At some point, Oisín tired. He shut off his arias and the transformation that ensued was gruesome to behold. In seconds, the proprietor’s face easily took on the weight of three centuries. Into streets still ankle deep were the assembled human wrecks banished, wetting their trouser cuffs as they proceeded. Pitiful was the departure to behold.
Was the wife happy upon confronting the hideously aged figure who returned to her side?
Guess.
The next morning, Jamie climbed into the saddle with me for a journey to County Kerry to visit Noelle Campbell-Sharp, erstwhile doyenne of the Irish print media, and another potential helper for my magazine scheme. Various gut-wrenching turns through the mountains finally brought us down a near cattle track to the coast and the tourist coach-pounded Ring of Kerry road with a turn soon looping toward Ballinskelligs. This continued to a magnificent headland north of Waterville, still so unblighted by holiday-home horrors that the area serves as a prime playground for some of the most influential people in Ireland, among them our hostess and her friends.
Noelle’s art gallery was the rendezvous. A circular, thatched-roof stone affair, it looked like a deluxe bungalow in a game resort I once visited in South Africa. But its whitewashed interior walls displayed an array of finely executed landscape paintings and quirky sculptures, which piqued my curiosity.
Now in her late fifties, Noelle Campbell-Sharp had thrived as a shrewd marketing maven in Dublin, and then became a Bentley-driving publisher of a long list of magazines aimed at capitalizing on the Irish public’s craving for glossy images befitting a modern “fifty-second state.” In a radio interview she’d once summed up her editorial vision as “Let them eat strawberries.” Her most successful publication was Irish Tatler, an offspring of the English flagship of gossip that had made her a handsome profit when she’d sold it off a decade or so before.
Hardly glamorous, she was in full Kerry mode upon arriving, a windbreaker yanked over her shoulders and her blond hair straggling around a broad face showing no trace of makeup. We sipped tea at the far end of her gallery beside an enormous hearth, smoldering with fragrant brown clumps of proper, hand-dug turf.
One could hardly imagine her being best friends with the Irish gossip columnist queen Terry Keane, who was rumoured to have spent twenty-seven years consorting with Charlie Haughey, the notorious former prime minister (Taoiseach). It is said that he used to whisk her off for weekends in Paris or the various country houses of his discreetly guffawing Hibernian friends. This was of course the same “Champagne Charlie” who is also alleged to have attempted to smuggle guns for the IRA and squelched every 1980s attempt at ending Ireland’s proscriptions upon contraception and divorce, while lecturing the Republic about the sanctity of family values and churchly ways. At this moment, magisterial Charlie was now holed up on his Kerry island estate not twenty miles from where we sat, forever hounded by the press and the tribunals investigating the corruption that had so deeply infested the Irish politics of his era.
Our hostess, who has sipped from many a fluted glass with Ireland’s ruling class, clearly had her own knack for working the strings of leverage. About ninety seconds were allotted for my description of the would-be Cork magazine. “Magazine publishing is a brutal business,” she allowed. “I know what I’m talking about because I dragged eleven of them into success when everyone said no woman could do such a thing. What we are doing here in Ballinskelligs is not easy either, but if you have enough vision and energy and the goal is right, anything is possible. That is how we’re proceeding because our projects here have the potential to revive this entire part of Kerry.”
A young English woman offered us tea. I knew that Noelle had recently created an artists’ retreat nearby called Cill Rialaig, along with some eccentric creation dubbed the Ballroom of Imagination and Desire. Alas, a squall of Kerry talk made it impossible to get a question in edgewise.
“More than a hundred artists and writers from around the world now come every year to live in our retreat and soak up inspiration from these mountains and seas. We ask for nothing in return, but some give us paintings because what they experience here is life- changing. We are also trying to create the most important public art museum outside Dublin, which could be a tourist magnet for this entire region. But does the Arts Council bother to even come and visit? Look, here’s their latest letter. I regret, blah, blah. Funding limitations, blah, blah. Can you believe this? If they just came to Cill Rialaig they would understand the meaning of renaissance. Shouldn’t anyone in the arts comprehend the meaning of renaissance? Once you stand by the cliffs there and soak it all up, you will see. Margaret Atwood will be here this summer.”
Whoa, girl. Noelle barely left breathing space between her words, with not a one said about the launching of a certain Cork magazine, the well-advertised reason for our tortuous three-hour drive. One couldn’t help thinking of the words famously uttered by New York City’s garrulous former mayor, Ed Koch: “So enough about me already. Let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?”
We climbed into her golden Mercedes and sliced through the village and onto the winding lane that led to her artists’ retreat on the headland. “Look there,” she blurted as we passed a driveway crowned by five ten-foot-high standing stones. “John O’Connor lives down that drive, the man who created the magnificent golf course on the Old Head of Kinsale. He’s on our board of directors. Have you met him?”
Gulp. “Name rings a bell somehow.”
“They say he put up one of those stones for each of his former mistresses and wives. I think for a while he was scouting me as the sixth, but I said, ‘John, you are not going to turn me into another one of your megaliths!’”
Drive on, coachman, drive on. The road narrowed into a single lane, with the eroded left side hugging cliffs that sank in a freefall two or three hundred feet down into the crashing Atlantic. I frantically clung to the door handle, then jammed my feet onto imaginary passenger-side brakes. All the while, Noelle blithely barreled into blind hairpin turns, talking nonstop, even though it would spell certain death if so much as a sheep materialized from the opposite direction.
Finally she stopped.
“You look a little green,” said Jamie as we climbed onto the gravel lane, the wind whistling off the ocean and burnishing the sinewy pastures and rocks of the magnificently desolate headland named, peculiarly, Bolus.
“Never felt better,” I gasped. This was partially true, because the incandescent afternoon sun threw a silver fire on the sprawling bay with its surrounding mountains, gleaming strands, and far headlands all exhaling vapors of mist. Whorls of the stuff breathed around the bony pair of islands called Scariff and Deenish; and miles out, the hulking Skellig rock, home to otherworldly monks for centuries, soared up like a hallucination. The most accomplished painter would despair of ever doing justice to such grandeur.
A single whitewashed cottage, possibly still beyond the reach of electricity, nosed up from a sheep-clotted hollow. It in itself was art, a portrait of life at its most elemental, listing in harmony with the landscape. A stringy old man appeared at its door and waved with the unhurriedness of someone tied to this place for untold generations and who likely had never wandered more than ten miles in his life. Ruined hovels lay a bit closer, the kind of dark, dirt-floored two-room dwellings where the fellow’s ancestors would have shivered through the ages past. Noelle called hello to the farmer, with whom she was doing a Kerry dance about her flirting desire to purchase these last remnants to complete the resurrection of the nearby Famine-era village.
“A lovely man,” she said. “But he’s a cute one when it comes to selling the patch.”
We walked back to her artists’ retreat, a succession of five sensitively restored stone cottages at the edge of creation, all discreetly warmed by simple modern conveniences and bright skylights over airy studio spaces. They were stone heaps before Noelle shouldered into the place, one pile having been home to Séan Dhónail Mhuiris Ó Conail, an ill
iterate nineteenth-century fisherman, farmer, and famous seanachi, or traditional Gaelic-speaking storyteller, who spellbound listeners with his stories from a clockless world that effortlessly preserved tales passed through the centuries. One of this father-of-ten’s gems was translated and written down thus:
Three brothers they were who went to sea in a ship. They spent a long time at sea without meeting land, and they feared they would not meet any, but finally came to an island which was wooded to the shore. They tied their ship to a tree, and they went inland. They saw no one and met no one. They set to work then, and at the end of seven years one of them said:
‘I hear the lowing of a cow!’
No one answered that speech.
Seven more years passed. The second man spoke then, and said:
‘Where?’
It went on like that for another seven years.
‘If you don’t keep quiet,’ said the third man, ‘we will be put out of this place.’
Improbably, another celebrated seanachi named Pats Ó Conaill inhabited the same settlement until the 1920s, his stories also magical. Undoubtedly not yet familiar with either fabulist, a freshly arrived, willowy German artist with mesmerizing green eyes invited us to her temporary new residence.
“It is out of dis vorld,” she sighed. “But my easel posting is the screwed up. It has not been here.”
“Just ease into things, everything in Ballinskelligs comes in its own time,” Noelle said, breezing past. After noting the neatly modern appointments in the kitchen, she led us up to the loft bedroom with its stunning vistas. One could not dispute that this charismatic woman had indeed brought replenishing life to an ancient world, so very like the one I had sampled in Dingle with Bun, only just across the waves from where we now stood.
Noelle’s ten-times larger stone house lay a couple of miles back toward the village. Commanding sweeping views of the same dreamscape, it boasted a fifteen-foot-tall, nineteenth-century anchor resting against its front wall. The sunken foundations of some ancient dwelling on the lawn provided the setting for summer garden parties. Inside, she’d kitted out her own homey pub at the eastern end of the house. Every room was fraught with quirks, including narrow winding stone stairs suggesting passages to castle keeps. Fine paintings and sculptures nested everywhere in the front reception rooms, with graceful statues fingering towards grand portraits. A cavernous rear banquet hall boasted an enormous oaken table designed to weather heaping platters and goblets for twenty revelers at a time. Bronze candelabra hung from the cathedral-like ceiling, one end of the mead hall featuring a galley kitchen reached by an iron spiral staircase. The walls, with sconces for more candles, were done up in terracotta embossed with runic whorls and ancient Celtic gods and goddesses in relief. The scene was fit for Irish chieftains, and Noelle naturally could not resist commissioning a mural featuring herself languishing on a throne, merry-faced in medieval robes and surrounded by similarly costumed friends, among them a beaming Terry Keane, stage left.
Noelle’s house is the kind of place wherein one can imagine secret chambers behind bookcases, and intrigues playing out in the wee hours of the night. Our hostess made a point of showing us a distant guest bedroom whose door and walls were done in the kind of kaleidoscopic flourishes that ennoble classic gypsy caravans, and, sure enough, she had commissioned a nearby “traveler” to let his imagination run wild in this boudoir. Marvelous old circus artifacts and creepy masks sprung up in every corner.
We retreated to her home’s pub, which altogether redefined the notion of a “local.” While Noelle fetched a bottle of sherry from behind the mahogany bar, I eyed a collection of photographs that showed her in the full exuberance of youth, beside sleek sports cars and arm-in-arm with swell friends.
Meanwhile, she rattled on, mostly about her visions for the blossoming of the Kerry art scene. It became clear that the true purpose of our visit had been kept secret until now – it was to promote her quest and not mine.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” I finally interrupted as the shadows began to darken in her quaint pub. “But we have to get back to our children soon because it’s a long drive, and I was wondering what prospects you see in my magazine idea.”
“Drive back to Cork? But that’s crazy. You must spend the night here,” she pronounced, looking slightly crestfallen as if the discussion of our project had been reserved as a highlight for the evening’s dinner party.
“That’s very kind,” I said, wavering slightly. “But we have no babysitter lined up and really must go shortly. So I just thought I’d ask about the magazine.”
“Oh yes, your magazine. Unfortunately, it’s been several years since I’ve had anything to do with publishing. I’ve left that world behind,” Noelle started hesitantly. Suddenly, an invisible gear turned. “I told you that Irish publishing is a murderous business. You wanted to deal with Cork, right? I have great time for Cork. You said something about having done up a proper business plan. Good. On the other hand, you might as well forget everything in your plan. Success isn’t about plans. It’s about one’s force of will. But the local Cork market is teensy, maybe three thousand subscribers if you’re lucky. The thing everybody starting a magazine forgets is that the editorial content is almost irrelevant. It’s about advertising, advertising, advertising. You have to hire someone who can sell advertising in their sleep.”
“That sounds good, but I was wondering . . .”
In full guru mode now, Noelle brooked no interruption. “You might have to give this person a stake in ownership, say 5 percent. No more than 10, certainly. Go for the national players, the ones with deep pockets and cachet – Guinness, Irish Distillers, Aer Lingus, maybe luxury car manufacturers, Waterford Crystal . . .”
High in the dusky sky outside, one could see a sliver of emerging moon. It would soon get interesting on those hairpin mountain turns, especially if we were subjected to nocturnal versions of Kerry’s flying goats.
And the message was by now clear. Advertising – and more advertising. Fair enough, for this woman clearly spoke from experience, and her enormous vitality spoke for itself. “It’s been splendid, but I’m afraid we really must . . .”
“That’s mad,” the lady of the House of Imagination and Desire insisted.
The sherry was refreshed. “John O’Connor will be joining me for dinner. I’m sure he would love to meet you both,” Noelle pressed on. “He might even advertise in your magazine.”
Feet shifted, eyes darted, embarrassed thoughts swam like fish seeking cover under rocks. There was no place left to hide. “Well, I’ve met him already, actually, and once was enough.”
I said that we really must go and nudged Jamie out the door, imagining errant golf balls falling like apocalyptic hail onto the bonnet of our fleeing station wagon.
Return to beginning of chapter
Chapter 18
The great thing about dreaming up a regional magazine is that it creates excuses for explorations without end. Cork is the largest county in Ireland, running about 110 by 60 miles at its longest and widest reaches, though about as regular in dimensions as a cloud. It has arthritic long fingers of stone probing the wild Atlantic to the west, knobby formations poking toward Kerry and Tipperary’s mountains to the north, while to the south scalloped bays and craggy promontories undulate and switch directions and moods in a slow sojourn east toward County Waterford. In short, the place is such an improbable land mass that a precisely drawn map of it looks like the work of a drunk.
West Cork alone offers a nearly inexhaustible feast for the traveler: out of sight lie hollows where potato whiskey (poteen – the little pot) is made; high lakes and primal Gaelic-speaking mountains; tractor-shaved farm valleys; fishing villages; holiday havens; biker paradises; hippie colonies; curious offshore islands (one of them reachable only by cable car). All of these, and more, polka dot the endlessly fascinating region. Being fairly thorough in our weekend tours of our new land, we’d about covered two-thirds of West Cork by now
. But Mid-Cork, with its market town of Macroom, which is populated by Macrumpians, and its tiny overlooked encampments with names like Drohideenaclochduff and Inchigeelagh, beckoned, precisely because they were off the tourist charts.
A typical January Saturday or Sunday ran as follows: “C’mon boys, it’s time to hit the road.”
“Where are we going this time? Why don’t we just stay here? Can Connor come? Scott? Feidhlim? No? Well, I want to stay here and play. Why not? I’m not going!”
“But Mommy’s packed lunch.”
Hands on her head, Laura, a finalist at this point in the slowest- dresser-in-Ireland competition, would stare in disbelief as I loaded the car with fishing gear, bicycles, baseball mitts, skateboards, cameras, slickers, Wellington boots, and why not a sketch pad. “Laura! Would you grab the binoculars please?”
“Aren’t you forgetting the pole vaults and trampoline?” Jamie would ask.
So off we sallied for a while to the megaliths, woodland walks, and backwaters of Mid Cork, until the family had its fill there.
After a week’s pause, there dawned a troubling realization that our little ingrates knew nothing about North Cork. This seemed unforgivable, because here waited another exploration, and perhaps even a cover story for the new Cork Magazine.
So we set our sights on a region that boasts the gorgeous River Blackwater, running through a valley of verdure and great houses, and attracts aristocrats the world over to this day, with British toffs champions of the social set.
At the ungodly hour of noon, our daughter rubbed sleep from her eyes. “North Cork? Why?”
Hadn’t I stayed overnight, Laura, with foxhunting Anglo-Irish holdovers on a sprawling estate outside Mallow, still measuring about eight thousand acres? Hadn’t I helped them muck out their stables, because we shared a dear mutual friend? Hadn’t I savored fine whiskey at their kitchen table afterward?
Jaywalking with the Irish Page 17