by Ultan Macken
Actually the offer came through while I was in the Mid-West on a short trip last week, so that I am afraid I was one of the last to know about it. But it’s wonderful news just the same, and at the cost of sounding immodest, I predicted this would happen when I first read the book. It’s a grand piece of work, in some ways your best, I think, and what has happened to date is solid confirmation that a number of people think so.
Well every bit of fortune has its attendant problems, and yours is in the form of work. I know you won’t let down our friend, John Beecroft, at the Literary Guild, who really needs the background article by the first of March. Since you did something similar for ‘Rain on the Wind’, I’m sure you don’t need a further briefing from me. But because it might be helpful to see how the Guild is doing these things currently, I am sending you a copy of ‘Wings’, their magazine. So much for the publicity part.
Now Mr Beecroft has made a further suggestion which I think is wise, not only from his point of view but from our own, concerning American publication. Here’s what he says:
We feel the book needs a foreword explaining the political situation and the seriousness of the Cromwell campaign in Ireland with some reference made to the determined effort to stamp out the Catholic Church and the significance of the Oath of Allegiance.
He also felt a map was needed. Now Don has mentioned that you had prepared a sketch or two which Macmillans in London think highly of. We look forward to seeing these just as soon as possible, so that we can determine whether they will fill the bill.
Mr John P. Budlong completed his letter telling my father that he was resigning from Macmillan to move to a new job in McGraw–Hill and he wished my father all the best in his work.
Don Congdon, his American agent, explained in a letter that the selection by the Literary Guild meant a guaranteed payment of $30,000 of which half went to the publisher, meaning that my father would earn at least $15,000 and Congdon believed that if the book sold well it could earn him something like $20,000.
Terese Sacco had news of the publication of my father’s books in Polish and Russian. The Polish publisher decided to publish Sullivan and planned to publish 10,000 copies of the novel in paperback. They offered to pay a royalty of 5% but they wanted to pay in the Polish currency of zlotys. Terese advised that the best way to make use of the money would be to spend a holiday in Poland. On 4 March, she wrote that they had heard from the Russian publisher:
We are pleased to inform you that Publishers of Foreign Books in Moscow have recently published your collection of short stories, ‘The Green Hills’. We are sending you by air (registered) four copies of your book. We wish you good health and creative success.
(signed) Pavel Czurvikov
The Director
The Soviet Union was not a signatory of the Berne Convention so it did not pay royalties for its publication of books by foreign authors. However, the two translators of the work began to write regularly to my father and over the next few years, they translated many of his books into Russian. They wrote to him regularly and he explained what he meant by phrases that were purely Irish slang, not really the King’s English!
The extraordinary friendship which my father developed with the two Russian translators is illustrated somewhat in the following letter they wrote to him in March 1959:
Moscow.
March 30th 1959
Dear Mr Macken,
We thank you very much for the books which Messers MacMillan & Co. Ltd. sent us on your request and which we have already received.
We admire ‘Rain on the Wind’ very much. We started translating it into Russian already half a year ago, and have almost completed the translation. We will advise you if and when it is published. We are now studying the play [probably ‘Home is the Hero’] and its possibilities here.
We are sending you today under separate cover a copy of ‘Green Hills’ and a copy of one of our leading magazines – ‘Ogoneki’ – also containing some of your stories.
The portrait on the cover was copied from a small photograph on the jacket of ‘Green Hills’. We are not very sure of the resemblance. If the artist has done a poor job of it we hope you wouldn’t mind it very much. Please send us a good picture of yourself for any future editions.
We would like you to know that your stories were very favourably reviewed by the press. An article in ‘Literaturnaya Garesta’ of March 3 says in conclusion:
Walter Macken is a new name for Soviet readers. The publication of these stories is most welcome as the author is undoubtedly a real artist who draws his characters with liveliness truth and beauty and he has an excellent eye for the dramatic incidents of life.
Sincerely yours,
Vera Ganoba and Nanina Nizovovc
My father received a really nice letter from his new editor in Macmillan in New York, Al Hart:
The Macmillan Company,
Sixty-Fifth Avenue,
New York.
March 5th 1959
Dear Walter Macken,
You can imagine with what pleasure I forwarded to Don Congdon your file copies of your contract together with our check for your advance. I would have been extremely glad, in the normal course of events, to have been your American editor for ‘Seek the Fair Land’; as it is with a whopping Literary Guild bonanza to signalize the beginnings of our relationship, I’m positively euphoric. Congratulations and don’t spend it all in one place!
You may well not remember this but I do, vividly and with warmth; after your performance at the Westport Playhouse in ‘Home is the Hero’, you repaired to my house in Weston along with Randy Williams and John Budlong. I remember being impressed by your sparkle after a long and gruelling day, and I was sorry when the time came to deliver you to your hotel. And although you didn’t know it, I was engaged in silent prayer that we would make it, for my gas indicator (petrol to you) registered zero.
I have just returned from a six week trip to Paris and London, and nothing would have pleased me more than to have seen you in Ireland, but my crowded schedule absolutely prohibited this. I did, however, have a very pleasant session with Lovat Dickson who had just returned from seeing you, and I felt closer by at least that much.
Please feel free to communicate directly with me whenever you like on any subject whatsoever. Bear in mind that I’m here to be used. You may be sure that I’ll keep you posted as I shepherd your new book through the machinery here.
Best regards,
Al Hart
Lovat Dickson who had helped him along throughout his writing career was delighted when my father presented him with the original drawings he had made and which had been included in the original hardback edition of Seek The Fair Land. Dickson writes to thank him for this:
London.
31st March 1959
My dear Walter,
Thank you so much for your letter and for a generous thought that pleases me enormously. I do like the drawing very much indeed, and I would be very proud to own it, though I think it should hang on the walls of Gort na Ganiv. However, I know you mean what you say, and I therefore accept it with the greatest pleasure. I will have a proof carefully pulled by hand for you, and what is more I will have it framed, and I will bring it to you when I come, as I hope to do, at the end of June.
I do thank you very much for what you have written. You are one of half a dozen authors whom it has given me the greatest pleasure and pride to work with in my long life of work, and I think I have learned more from you than I have from the others about integrity.
Yours ever,
Rache Lovat Dickson
The following article appeared in the Literary Guild Magazine about Seek the Fair Land:
John Beecroft presents the August selection:
The Irish have always been wondrous weavers of tales. This book by Walter Macken is a marvellous story. Several years ago the Guild used ‘Rain on the Wind’ by the same author. It was a good story, but not nearly as spellbinding as this book.
In ‘Seek the Fair Land’ Macken tells the story of Dominick, a man who was determined to survive the trouble and sorrows that beset Ireland. First he had thought he was secure in the city of Drogheda. Once, when Drogheda was besieged and he hid Murdoc, an Irish clansman, Murdoc told him he should not stay in towns, and that if Dominick ever needed security, to get out to the hills, to seek the high country.
Dominick helped Murdoc escape through a secret passage that led from his home to the river. A few years later Drogheda was again besieged – this time by Cromwell’s army. Their purpose was to put down all insurrection in Ireland, and everyone in Dominick’s city was to be killed. Luck was with Dominick; he survived the slaughter and with his two children, Peter and Mary Ann escaped through the same secret passage from his home to the river.
A man with two children could not move easily through a country infested with English soldiers. Their escape was further slowed by Father Sebastian, whom the English had wounded and left to die, and whom Dominick added to his party. Dominick’s son, Peter had suffered such shock during the siege that he had become dumb. The priest’s devotion to the children made the party of four a solid unit.
Finally after many adventures, they reached the town of Galway. Life was easier there, but Dominick soon got into trouble and again had to get out of town quickly. In the escape he found himself in company with Columba Dorsi, a wealthy woman of Galway who had refused to pay tribute to the English invaders. To Columba the escape in the boat and over the wild land was an entertainment – to Dominick and his family it was a life and death matter. Dominick, in spite of himself, was attracted to Columba [I don’t know where he got this idea – it isn’t in the book at all!] and Columba liked Dominick and his children.
When they reached their ‘fair land’ Dominick found that Murdoc had inherited the domain of his uncle and was now living in high feudal style in the castle. Murdoc welcomed Dominick and his children and remembered that he owed him his life and gave Dominick land to build a house. Columba settled in the castle as guest of Murdoc. Though he had reached the ‘fair land’ in the shelter of the hills, the life of adventure was not over for Dominick. Also he realised that Mary Ann was becoming a woman ready to marry – and he was astonished as everyone when Peter, his son, miraculously found he could speak.
‘Seek the Fair Land’ is superb story-telling. It is grand reading, and a novel with a message marked by faith and an abiding love.
My father wrote the following introductory note for the novel in the same copy of the Literary Guild magazine, Wings:
Many years ago, shortly after the last war, I read an account of battles long ago, and migrations of peoples, and it struck me how like it was to the age we are living in. At the time I was reading, Europe was torn apart, from the Channel Islands to the Urals. Few people had homes over their heads, or jobs or work or clothes or enough to eat. The whole of the Continent was sundered; and yet one knew that all this would pass, that people would survive, and in our own lifetime there would be adults to whom all this great cataclysm was merely history. How do we know this? Simply because it happened before.
Similarly, in a period in the lives of my own people, I saw a time in the seventeenth century when the Irish were living the history of all peoples. This was the dark night of the Irish soul, and it was to last a long time in the midst of Cromwellian brutality, persecution, and all the well-known satellites and camp followers of conquerors – famine, disease and pestilence. All this was not important. What was important was that the ordinary people, some of them, managed to survive it and pass on their own indomitable courage, hope, and faith to their children.
So this is the story of Dominick, a small man who, although much bereaved, snatched his daughter Mary Ann, his son Peter, and a wounded priest Sebastian from the massacre of Drogheda, and set out with them to find the fair land. It takes them a long time, right across the middle of a war-torn and hungry land, where the black horsemen ride at will, accompanied by wolves. Such a flight involves many hazards, requires courage and tenacity. They will meet with treachery, the friendship of the giant Murdoc, the sadism of Coote, who belongs to all terror-stricken epochs. They will be sheltered and will escape from walled towns. They will meet the ordinary people, living out their lives in terrible times, and they will find the fair land, where the mountains raise themselves from the hard earth and try to impart to man a little of their own strength and fortitude. They will find the fair land, but the fair land itself is a place that does not give itself easily, so they will have to fight for that too.
And all this is the story of how Dominick does so. Always people have been seeking the fair land. America was made what it is because people weren’t satisfied with what they had and set out to find it. Some of them found it: some of them didn’t. When it wasn’t in the east, they looked to the west; and when it wasn’t there, they went north or south. Even now, with a world where there are not too many wars, there are people still searching. If they seek long enough, they will find it.
This is the story of how Dominick found it.
In the same magazine, there is a paragraph about my father’s life written by the editor of the magazine:
He has appeared several times as an actor in the United States. People ask him how he can be a writer as well as an actor. The truth is, Mr Macken simultaneously goes about his daily life and thinks books. ‘Research in Ireland,’ he assures us, ‘mainly means talk.’ He believes that his ‘research’ has taken a lifetime of observing, listening and questioning.
My father got a letter from one member of the staff of Macmillan in London in April 1959:
Dear Mr Macken,
On reading ‘Seek the Fair Land’ in the proofs recently and becoming whole-heartedly involved with your wonderful characters and plot, I had a sneaking suspicion that Sir Charles Coote was a regrettably familiar figure to me. Indeed on visiting my mother’s house this weekend, I found his portrait hanging on the wall and he appears to have been an ancestor of mine. I thought you might be interested to see a photograph of this portrait together with the epitaph written below it which I always understood was on his tomb.
I am very interested to know whether in fact Sir Charles Coote was murdered in the way described in the book, if you know by any chance whether this was his epitaph and if so where is he buried? [I think my father’s dramatic description of Sir Charles Coote’s murder by Murdoc came from his imagination – the historical fact appears to be that he died of a fever in his bed.]
My mother’s family still lives in Ireland and the name Coote has appeared more than once in the family tree. I must say I am rather hesitant about writing to you as your feelings are so obviously engaged on the other side (and small wonder!) but I thought you would be intrigued to hear that Macmillans was unwittingly harbouring a descendent of the villain of your book.
It is possible that Independent Television may want to interview you on their Bookman programme. Would you consider making a trip to London should they decide to televise you on publication? (This last question is in my business capacity as assistant to Mr White in advertising.)
Yours sincerely,
Elizabeth Romyn (Mrs)
Terese Sacco, who became his principal editor instead of Lovat Dickson, wrote to him on 28 May about a statement she had received from the Russian publishers of The Green Hills:
‘You know, of course, that the Soviet Union does not take part in international arrangements with regards to author’s royalties. It is therefore, as you will understand, very difficult for us to enter into negotiations with your firm regarding Mr Macken’s royalties. We have nothing against the author but we cannot deviate from our principles.’
I consider the last sentence a minor masterpiece. I think I shall have a principal that forbids me to pay my rent – while generously holding no ill will towards the landlord. I suppose there must be some happy medium between the ‘Reader’s Digest’ and Russia?
All good wishes,
As ever,
Terese
My father received an invitation to attend the Berlin Film Festival as the leading actor in Home is the Hero, but he decided not to attend. He did not see any purpose in attending such a festival.
In October, news came of the success of Seek the Fair Land from Don Congdon:
October 6th 1959
Dear Walter,
Al Hart has just reported the following in connection with trade sales of ‘Seek the Fair Land’:
‘As I think you know, our first printing was 12,500 copies. As of today we have disposed of 8,000 copies including presentations. My guess is that the first printing will be exhausted early next year.’
When I’ve got more news towards the end of fall, I’ll report again.
Yours,
Don
Now that the first historical novel was published and launched, work had begun on the second volume. A bit of a diversion came on 13 October 1959, when a different publisher, the World Publishing Company, was interested in commissioning my father to write a full-length adult biography of Daniel O’Connell. They were anxious to tie my father to a contract to write the biography and they were willing to pay him an advance of $4,000. The man from this new publishing company, Thomas P. Coffey, had actually worked with Macmillan before joining the World Publishing Company.
However, Al Hart did not want to lose Walter Macken to the World Publishing Company and he was willing to pay an advance of $5,000 either on a biography or else on a fictional work where Daniel O’Connell’s life would be the a background to it. With prompting from Don Congdon, the letter commissioning the novel came from Al Hart on 30 December 1959: