Glynn leaned back in the chair the better to get a good look at us. He folded his arms over his chest, which rose and fell soundlessly – he appeared to be panting, though he wasn’t out of breath, not that we could tell. Faye said she thought he was having a heart attack, then thought she was having one herself at this prospect. From the outset, he commanded this level of rapt, almost fearful, concern. He was a spectacle we watched, a visual installation. We never knew what to expect.
Glynn’s scornful gaze roved from one face to the next, sizing up who first to attack. Strange, how he singled the five of us out for special scrutiny, though there were seven students seated before him that first class. We like to think that he chose us. That’s what we like to think. He did not speak for the longest time, just stared at each of us in turn. Impossible to know what he was thinking during this interlude. Glynn’s mind was an object of fascination and some perplexity, a jellyfish washed up on a beach.
A jolt when his eyes met mine. To my shame, I couldn’t keep from blinking. That unnervingly silent bullfrog inflation and contraction of his chest – was he doing it on purpose? Was it a deliberate act of intimidation? There is every likelihood. My skin burned under the full force of his attention, but despite this uncomfortable proximity – intimacy, I almost called it – still I felt no closer to the artistic sensibility driving him, becoming instead only more aware of his remoteness, of the breadth of the gulf dividing us. I looked down at my notebook, my empty, unmarked notebook, unable to sustain his gaze.
When I raised my eyes again, Glynn had moved on. He was staring now at Guinevere, and Guinevere, more power to the girl, was staring right back. Aisling tilted her palms toward the great writer as if warming them at a fire. So she felt the heat radiating off him too.
The way he kept soundlessly panting like that, physically spent: I too wanted to be emptied out like him. Scraped clean of the seething mess within, granted the compensation of seeing it distilled into words, a life lived, an imagination quarried. Exorcisms, he had once called his books – demons that had been cast out to take form, hoisted up on bookshelves for all the world to see, a rack of carcasses in a butcher’s window.
‘What do you want from me?’ Glynn finally demanded, the words propelled at us as if he’d dealt them a belt of a hurl. The question highlighted a troubling discrepancy, one we had failed to anticipate. Glynn’s pre-eminence in our lives, the central role he had played, was such that, on some instinctive level, we expected him to recognise if not us, then our type. We had presumed he would understand innately what had driven us to his door, see that only he could help us with it and know it wasn’t something that could be communicated in a sentence, not by us at least.
When Glynn got no response, he tried another tack.
‘Why do you need me?’
‘We don’t need you,’ Antonia snapped, averting her face and presenting Glynn with a wing of ash-blonde hair. It was the first instance I recall of the pronoun ‘we’ being used to refer to the group. We don’t need you. The Anglo-Irish accent. Glynn won’t like that, I thought. Turned out I was wrong. He did like it, had liked it very much.
Glynn grunted. I thought for a second that he was going to stand up and leave, seeing as we didn’t need him after all. I think he thought so too. He spent a long while pulling at his earlobe. Antonia kept her face averted during this period; Aisling absorbed the bad vibes through her palms; Faye contemplated various avenues for making everything better, and Guinevere set her calm face in solemn preparation for whatever was to come. If Glynn left, he would not return, that much was plain.
‘Why do you want to write?’ he eventually asked, sighing to illustrate the excessive tolerance demanded of him by the situation. He nodded at the girl by the radiator, indicating that she should start. Sound choice, Professor Glynn. Selecting her had less to do with working from left to right than picking off the weakest first. Of the girl’s startled response (we never got her name) all I remember is ‘Well, um, because.’ It seemed Glynn was correct in his initial assessment that here sat a shower of messers.
I didn’t fare much better when my turn came. The question was designed to catch me out, to sift my dilettantism from his authenticity. Glynn had railed publicly against the notion that everyone had a novel in them, appearing to instead believe that he held the Irish monopoly on the form. This had earned him no friends amongst that contingent who slept with draft manuscripts inspired by the War of Independence under their mattresses, that standing army of ten thousand or so, and counting.
Well we knew that Glynn could make words do whatever he wished them to, could turn our words against us with a flick of the wrist, and perhaps this accounts for the reticence and caution with which we navigated his question that afternoon. Except for Antonia. Her answer alone stood out that day, both for the content and stark gravity of her delivery. Sadness progressively descended upon the room with her every word, falling, falling, weighing down our bodies like a blanket of snow. When she was finished, it was difficult to move.
She spoke in brief cogent sentences and never once had to cast about for the correct term, knowing already which words to apply, as if they were laid out on the desk before her. She picked them up and put them down again as though talking us through a selection of historical artefacts. If Glynn’s intention had been to send us skulking away in humiliation, well then, he had met his match. Antonia, face averted, nothing left to lose. I transcribe her answer, what I remember of it, in full, more or less, give or take:
7
Deirdre of the Sorrows
‘I am thirty-nine years old now,’ Antonia began, and lowered her head as if this were a shameful admission. ‘My mind is full of fragments of roads travelled. I cannot remember the journeys themselves. I do not recall the destinations. On these journeys, it is always dusk, and I am always strapped into the passenger seat of a car, staring out the window. Someone to my right, a man, is driving. I assume it is my ex-husband, but I have no real sense of his presence. It could be my dead father. It could be a stranger. We travel along the road in silence. The only sound is the drone of the engine. It is warm inside the car, but outside it looks inhospitable, too inhospitable to survive the night.
‘I have no idea where these roads are. There is nothing familiar about them. They are not within the environs of my home. Sometimes it is a rural landscape, other times suburban. Occasionally the region doesn’t look Irish at all, but vaguely Soviet in character, some deserted province I must have seen in a documentary. These fragments don’t present themselves in a chronological sequence, and are not linked to any particular person or event. If I could manage to glance down to see what I am wearing, there’s some chance I might be able to connect the journey to a specific occasion. A hospital visit, a funeral, something grim like that. But I can’t glance down. It is impossible to move my head. I’ve been staring out the passenger window for so long that my neck has set.
‘All that remains of my twenties and thirties are these puzzling oddments, these disconnected recollections of staggered junctions, derelict outhouses, oppressive tunnels, road kill of indeterminate species. These fragments loom up at me without warning at any time of the day or night – at least three of them this morning alone. I am never safe from them. I could be making the bed or reading a book when, out of nowhere, I am confronted with a desolate road at twilight. These images leave me with a sense of profound emptiness, close to nausea in quality. There seems no end to the store stockpiled in my head. This is the mind I have been left with.
‘Do you see?’ she asked, suddenly addressing us, but thankfully not waiting for an answer. ‘I have come to regard these snatches of roads as flashbacks from a kidnapping. The man in the driver’s seat is my abductor. I was not, of course, abducted. It is merely how I’ve learned to interpret these images. The girl I used to be was bundled into a car and whipped away from her life. I am the changeling who took her place. She transmits these messages to remind me she’s still out there.
‘And now I find I am disappointed. I am a disappointed woman. What will sustain me through the long years ahead? The only good to be derived is that twenty years of this is enough to demonstrate the necessity to stop. It is time to plug the dam of wasted days. So, here I am.’ She shrugged.
It appeared to be darker in the workshop when Antonia had finished speaking. Residues of her dusk roads had invaded the room, draining the colour from things, extinguishing the warmth. We saw them in our minds’ eyes – her wretched thorny hedgerows snagged with shreds of plastic bags, her stagnant brown ditchwater, her rapidly dimming skies.
Antonia looked around calmly for a response, but got none. There was nothing to be said. What, I wonder, had she expected from us? We were so much younger than her. What did we know? She had moved beyond our frame of reference. However, she instilled an awareness that what had happened to her could as easily happen to one of us if we did not lead our lives with due vigilance, though to play that cautionary role was not what she had come for.
‘I hate the word “journey”,’ Antonia concluded, and Glynn nodded. He nodded for a long time, apparently knowing what all this meant.
The second he was gone, Antonia began to tremble. Her lips turned purple as she shook with rage. ‘Effing bastard,’ she hissed, ‘trying to demean us like that. Who the hell does he think he is?’ A bubble of anxiety formed in the pit of my stomach. There was something about a grown woman’s rage that I could not begin to cope with. Glynn would have been horrified too. He might have acted with a little circumspection had he witnessed her in that state, had he apprehended her terrifying volatility.
The three girls, naturally, knew exactly what to do. They sprang into action and were making soothing noises, stroking her arms, smoothing her hair, as I found myself being propelled out of that room with a velocity that I can only excuse as involuntary.
8
Strumpet City
I got nothing written in the library after that first workshop. I couldn’t concentrate on the page. A whole two words I managed to beat out during the long hours I sat in the chair: ‘bearing’ and ‘virtue’. I keep the scrap of paper still. They weren’t words I’d resorted to in the past, being terms from a different era, essentially, the courtly love period, perhaps. I am no authority.
Both were an attempt to evoke the same subject: Guinevere. The dullest throb of a notion had begun to form in my mind, innocently enough at first, and so inappreciable that it was months before I saw what I was up to, and months again before I admitted to it: that if I observed Guinevere, if I studied Guinevere, if I seized upon Guinevere, I would be able to write. As it so happened, I was not alone in formulating this plan.
I took down the library reference copy of Glynn’s Farm Animals, a novel which, according to Dr M. J. Hanratty’s breeze block of a biography, was originally submitted under the title Apophthegm. In light of the substantial length of this, Glynn’s seventh novel (even with a dense word-per-page ratio, it ran to some seven hundred and seventy-two pages), the title was presumably employed in an ironic capacity. His publishers, whilst acknowledging the formidable power and importance of the work, and asserting their ongoing and unwavering support for Glynn’s career, declined to publish the novel under that title, arguing that readers would be alienated by the use of a word they didn’t understand, let alone know how to pronounce. ‘An overabundance of consonants, Patrick,’ Tobias Sweetman, the highly respected editor-in-chief of Prior Press, is reported to have told Glynn at a lunch held in Bloomsbury in the writer’s honour. We can only imagine the alcohol-fuelled reaction. Glynn’s artistic judgement had never been queried before.
When Apophthegm was politely but firmly ruled out by Prior Press as a title, Glynn’s response was characteristically uncooperative. He submitted Homophone as an alternative option, followed by Uaigneas, then Ocras, the first two Irish words to enter his head, endeavouring to force Tobias to concede to his original choice. At least he’d addressed the preponderance-of-consonants issue, not that anyone thanked him.
Tobias, a fair man, and acting solely in Glynn’s interest – a writer needs readers, after all, whether he likes it or not – didn’t concede, and the novel was published in the summer of 1977 under the title Farm Animals, a ‘last ditch compromise with which nether [sic] party was happy’ (Hanratty, p. 655). Glynn’s subsequent polemic, ‘The Death of Art,’ which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (24 June 1977, p. 762) to coincide with the publication of Farm Animals, depicted Western culture as a steadily evaporating pond in a vast featureless desert in which words and concepts not instantly grasped by the masses (or ‘pond life,’ as he unhelpfully termed them) were pitched out onto the sun-cracked banks to thrash about and die.
The essay was similarly scathing in its criticism of a thinly veiled Tobias Sweetman, pillorying him as ‘cowardly’, ‘womanish’ (Glynn’s lowest term of abuse) and ‘woolly-headed’, epithets which, by all accounts, were wildly undeserved. Glynn had committed the mortal sin of allowing his vicious streak to enter the public domain. Didn’t he know they’d be waiting for him in the long grass? Didn’t he care?
‘It is doubtless that many authors have a nasty side,’ noted the books columnist in the Sunday Times, ‘but few display it so cheerfully.’ ‘Farm animal indeed,’ remarked the Observer. Sweetman declined to comment on the matter.
Glynn’s unprovoked attack marked the end of what had been a fruitful editorial relationship lasting some twenty-two years. Within eighteen months Sweetman was dead, and the general sentiment amongst the London publishing fraternity, according to Dr Hanratty’s presumably authoritative sources, was that the Irishman had hastened the Englishman’s end, a charge to which Glynn responded – when it was put to him in an interview in those blunt terms – ‘Oh, so it’s political now, is it?’ The Troubles in Northern Ireland were at fever pitch. Glynn terminated the interview and left. Sweetman, it should be noted, had suffered an aneurysm, for which Glynn could hardly be held accountable.
Were he a less volatile man, or better equipped to grieve, or simply capable of taking good advice, Glynn might have been moved by the occasion of Tobias’s sudden passing to compose another essay for the TLS, this time reflecting on the brevity of life and the foolish vanity of the ego – the two old friends had fallen out over a mere book title, after all, a weak one at that. Glynn conspicuously failed, however, to express his regret at Tobias’s untimely death, leading to a deep-seated bad feeling toward him in the London publishing houses which endures to this day. Wherever Glynn went, the sound of slamming doors followed. Doors slammed by him, doors slammed on him.
Glynn’s uncharacteristic taciturnity in the wake of Tobias’s death was, as Antonia pointed out, his own choice. Nobody forced him to keep his mouth shut. No one had twisted his arm. ‘He’s old enough and ugly enough, etc.,’ were Antonia’s exact words, being a woman who favoured the use of abbreviations in speech. She adopted a heightened faux-naturalistic style when expressing herself, mentally passing her conversation through a filter that converted her initial choice of words into the colloquial dialogue of a contemporary novel. Perhaps it was an attempt to counterbalance the horsy vowels of her accent, about which she was defensive in our low company, you could tell. That’s my theory at least.
Her self-conscious mimicry of the patterns of natural speech set me to thinking that Antonia was not revealing her true self to us but, instead, displaying some class of literary construct that she had concocted at home, demonstrating how all-consuming her desire to be a writer was, but nobody, if you listen closely, speaks the way characters in novels speak. Were you to transcribe an overheard conversation, it would read as contrived. The impression of verisimilitude created by a fine writer is an illusion, just as old masters succeed in making paint look more like skin than skin. Somehow, ineffably, the artifice transcends itself to become art. This uncommon ability to render the vision of the imagination onto paper or canvas or the bars of a stave is just one of those unquantifiable transf
ormative powers with which the monumentally gifted, like Glynn, are blessed.
Farm Animals, despite the unhappy circumstances of its publication, always had the effect of recalibrating my mind, making me wish I could add my voice to its chorus, the way a great song makes you want to join in and sing. I opened it to the prologue. Some idiot had underlined and asterisked the opening sentence in red biro and scrawled Cult of Self in the margin. ‘Shadows like rock pools,’ I read, ‘as cool and dark and alluring as–’ It was no good. I snapped the book shut.
Even the opening paragraph, which I knew by heart, was beyond my scope that day. I could not begin to access Glynn’s world, or the ‘liquid suspension of the fictional environment’, as he’d referred to it once in a keynote lecture delivered to an international conference on Irish literature in Stockholm. The full text was reproduced in a collection of essays I’d picked up for seven pence in a second-hand bookshop on Talbot Street otherwise jammed with Corgi paperbacks. The collection, In Finnegans Wake: Irish Fiction after Joyce, stood head and shoulders over its shelf-mates, high and solitary and most stern and, judging by the virginal condition of the spine, unread.
All Names Have Been Changed Page 5