As much as he must have set an example to follow I don’t think I ever quite got the knack. For I fear that in my earliest imitative attempt to step out as a fashion plate I only invited dismay and shock. One school morning sporting the most bizarre plaid, indubitably non Harris, tweed jacket which jumped wildly alive in a blatant rainbow of colours, especially purple, orange and magenta. Worst of all was its tailoring, as it belonged to my older sister. In this memorable garment and in my conspicuous ignorance did I make my appearance within the ivied confines of the Fordham Preparatory School, which sported aplenty its own store of Jesuitical snobberies. One step inside the nearly ancient front hall I was confronted by the prefect of discipline. This black frocked ashplant thin custodian of young men’s behaviour delighted in being abruptly precise. Swaying back like a cobra he made a pursed kissing sound with his lips and, with the minimal raising of an arm, pointed with an indignant finger. ‘That. Do not wear it again. To this school.’
I did then forever after slump back down into my apologetic world of appalling taste. And have since always dressed only in pursuit of comfort and convenience and in the constant hope of avoiding raised eyebrows or accusing fingers, limiting myself to having upon one’s back the clothes that allow for shelter from inclemencies including the sun and can gain me discreet access anywhere in a usual day’s perambulations. And nothing worsted, herring bone or thornproof has ever succeeded in covering nearly all the multitude of my sins better than tweed in all its Harris variations. And as such latter weft and warp is from sheared sheep, where then shall we go to find them safely grazing. We shall on the face of this earth go to a windswept moonscape latitude high up on a chill moist longitude. West of Sutherland, west of Skye and across the Minch and upon western Scottish isles called the Hebrides.
But let us go leisurely there. For on the way arise matters which matter to this fabled fabric. In the early morning flood of cars weave by taxi to Kennedy airport. Fly up and out of New York as fast as these ample bodied motor birds will take us. Proceed over Ireland and, as the day darkens quickly, land in London. While meanwhile in my young life I marry a rich wool merchant’s beautiful daughter. And take Sunday sherry brunch at the Troutbeck Hotel in Ilkley in a cleft of that moor in Yorkshire, a long way from my own romantic Bronx. And where an inkling of Harris tweed is to be got from these mill owners’ sons who have already served their years of six a.m. apprenticeship sorting wool deep down in the dark bowels of their factories and did, while yarns wove their families great fortunes, quaff pints of mild and bitter ale, play rugby and clap each other upon their broad and tweedy backs. And because of them, and their wool, you might not ever have had today’s marvellous Scottish tweed by the name of Harris. For the Hebridean crofters’ looms clacking in their huts and houses dotted all over their islands are made in Yorkshire.
But just before I left New York I was suddenly struck in terror of my task. And phoned a previous godsend elegantly rich helpmate in London who still so treasures her privacy, wishes me not to factualize her name. I ask her would she hold my hand on a visit to the Hebrides. ‘Good God, J.P., whatever for.’ I answer: ‘To find me a mill owner while I write on men’s fashions in tweed.’ I listened patiently while at least fifteen dollars of mirth mounted on my phone bill. Till finally she stopped laughing and in an octave higher, said: ‘Heaven’s grief, who was mad enough to ask you to do that.’ She revealed further she was solidly booked up. But then in the next nearly five dollar silence, she sensed my crushed bitter disappointment. And then just as I was taking the receiver from my ear, I heard her welcome words. ‘My God, you poor sod, J.P., with your atrocious taste I had better go with you, hadn’t I, for I do when wearing ratcatcher foxhunting still go out in an indestructible Harris tweed jacket I inherited from my father.’
And now awaking in London, catching a breath over breakfast in the comfort of a Park Lane hotel, I make haste for a fistful of money from a bank in Harrods. Hopping into a taxi out its department store doors and on one’s way to St John’s Wood for Laura. When I said I was headed for the outer Hebrides, my driver’s first words were Harris tweed. And immediately we landed in the subject as we sped on this cherry blossoming warmish spring Thursday through Regent’s Park. Kind fate having put me in the company of a tailor whose father taught him the trade in the east end of London. In his day anything less than a twenty two ounce cloth for a tweed suit was, it was reckoned, an invitation to freeze to death. And now today in the northern hemisphere’s centrally heated climes the weight is more near to thirteen and fourteen ounces so that you do not gently stifle to your grave.
Laura still laughing, telling me that in the encyclopaedia, tweed could be a one time New York City political boss. Or indeed further afield on a map, you might put your finger on the Tweed river of Scotland. And alas neither serves as an origin for the cloth we know today. For the first word for it was ‘twills’ which has nothing to do with the River Tweed. And as Laura continued to chuckle I asked what was amusing her now. ‘Ah, J.P., like the cloth you travel so far to see, I suddenly find I am, in your wild goose chase, enjoying the deeper shades of ecstasy.’
In the fields carved within their ancient boundary lines, green crops budding up around Glasgow. As we arise by air again in a propeller plane with sea blue cowlings over its twin engines, the sere mountains of Scotland below. Snow high up in the crevices of their crests. Laura says they predict the colours of the wools that lie in wait. And in another fit of laughter in this homey aircraft she says she suspects that the solicitous steward so animatedly smiling and making tea in a pot, and so willing to please, must really be president and owner of the airline and would any second pop into the cockpit to help land the plane. Which now angles down over the blue water of the Minch. Dotted below on the faint green of a small island, one’s first sheep safely graze. The sheer dark brown edges of bogs which have been left carved empty in the ground, imagines for me one more colour of tweed. On this bereft Stornoway spot. Where we are bumpily deposited as near to Iceland as it is to London.
An orange windsock blowing over the airport grasses. Surrounding all these glacial blue lochs and inlets from the sea is a glorious barrenness. I panic as tomorrow at noon the mills are closing for a long weekend. At our Stornoway hotel Laura gets on the phone. Already arranging I meet the Member of Parliament for the Hebrides back in London. Then her brilliant vowels and charming words have in an instant caught a mill owner Kenneth Harris on the phone. Chairman and managing director of Harris McKenzie. Who says it’s mid season and he has to get up at five a.m. the next morning to enjoy a weekend off. And I arrange to speak to him by phone at nine p.m. I learn he has been working night and day non stop. And ask him for how many weeks. And he says, ‘Weeks? Good heavens no. For six or seven years it’s been non stop hectic.’ And even over the wires one can nearly hear the sweat still falling from Mr Harris’s brow. I ask does he have a favourite Scotch whisky. He says there’s no need to, as like Harris tweed they’re all perfection. And seeking such infallible impeccability, agents come to confer on behalf of all tweed loving Americans. To select this cloth first brought to the United States at the turn of the century by Brooks Brothers. And which is now again being readied since December. Such preparations presenting a new style for every season. Their innovative vogues coming from their sense of the market place. Their representatives visit in the year to see their foreign customers and attend the fashion shows. Then the theme comes. Upon which they perform their variations. Such instrumentalization being an in house effort. Their designers pedalling their own clacking looms. And six to seven thousand patterns are created.
Bright and early next morning Laura appears smiling in a splendid suit of the cloth of which we speak. On this mild sunny day she’s mapped out non stop appointments. At the mill of Clansman we meet the marketing director Murdo Morrison in the lobby. Suddenly I’m discovered as an author. Of novels. Out on this literary limb, I assure all that at least some of my soap opera characters more than occasi
onally wear a tweed which is Harris. Bruce Burns, managing director of Clansman Holdings, steps in. I’m relieved and pleased to be asked on behalf of a young daughter for an autograph. We follow behind his fleet footsteps. Into a skylit warehouse full of bales of 100 per cent Scottish wool. Their fibres cleaned and dyed lime, ochre, moss green, purple, crimson and crotal. The latter brewed from the lichen growing on Hebridean rock. The strands await ready to be teased and blended to make wondrous hues of yarn. His eyes alight, Mr Burns’s own expert fingers demonstrate the process beneath our eyes. He matches miraculously the very thread of one colour in my tweed cap. And I realize this man whose practised hand is able to operate any of his machines, is indeed composing notes of colour as one would strum a muted melody on a harp. And when he says they are ahead of fashion and create fashion and don’t follow it, you realize from whence his confidence comes.
Nearby a man is walking back and forth on a platform, weaving a great web of wondrously grey yarn like a spider, and in the process tying six hundred and seventy two knots. Preparing it softly folded to be dispatched out to the crofters where it is dropped off and the woven tweed is picked up. And nothing anywhere betrays this cloth that hath covered or shall ever clothe any back, that it comes into being by the most meticulous of man made means. We continue to waltz behind Bruce Burns through the myriad of rollers, shears, knives, cutters and trimmers. Our host taking a wool snippet in his hand. He rushes to wash it in a vat of ‘soap’, taking it three times out again to the light until finally this man there amid his acres of factory is holding in his hand to his own utter delight this tiny symbol of magic creation, a wee rainbow of delicate bright magically shimmering colours. His twinkling fervent eyes alive as he talks of his ‘cook’s recipe’, from which ten different colours of wool might be blended to get just one shade of yarn. He now takes to the sunlight his handful of fibre, his fingers playing in adoration across the delicate rainbow of colours held in his hand. ‘Just look at that, is there anything anywhere as delicately beautiful.’
We are brought to an annexe where ladies drape the cloth up to the daylight. Spying out the least of tiny imperfections to mend. And back in the large finishing room is another lady from the Harris Tweed Association stamping with her iron, authenticating the cloth as it passes beneath her watchful eye. Every three metres imprimatured by heat transfer with the trademark orb of Harris Tweed. And who brought this cloth to notice out of the Hebrides. Ah as you might know as a man, it was a woman. Unmentioned in any encyclopaedia. But nevertheless the Countess of Dunmore to be precise. Who in the eighteen forties in order to help crofters on her Hebridean estate, carried the tweed to London to sell among her aristocratic friends. And now on this day it goes out to much of the world. Still woven by foot power which both mill owners and weavers in 1979 refused to change to electric and larger looms. These isles remaining a political delight without industrial strife. The people still living in their villages. And every crofter master of his own time.
In tow with two dedicated handsomely tweed jacketed members of the Harris Tweed Association we head past front neat gardens where sheep securely graze around stacks of lobster pots. We reach a crofter, Murdo Angus Macleod. Who with pretty wife and daughters dwells quietly by a cemetery. His brand new shiny house nearly built by himself with seven bedrooms. And in these changing times, has a bathroom with a bidet. Out in his loom shed, even in the coldest of weathers Mr Macleod sweats. He once counted his pedals by foot which took ninety six thousand times to produce his piece of cloth eighty five yards long. Twice the distance of a marathon.
Laura gliding in her elegance, puffing her cigar. Admiring these sunny sunny folk, who with their old wisdom tolerate life so well in such a grey windswept place. Yet where colours lurk wondrous as they do in its most burnished brown of tweeds. And as muted as the bowl of Scotch Broth Laura has for her lunch at an hotel bar for thirty pence. A man in a black leather jacket who’s read my books and whose occupation is oil invites us to a crowded smoky room and a last night of whisky and folk songs. And all too soon one wakes up back in London. With Laura gone as she does in spring to her yacht in Monaco.
I sit now waiting in the shadowy plush confines of the Savoy Hotel. Shaking firm hands with Donald Stewart, Member of Parliament for the Hebrides. And although looking sombre like the islands, he is, like so many of the people he represents, a commercially wise and smilingly contented pipe smoking man. I learn from Mr Stewart that Hebridean libraries issue more books per head than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. And the islands also send more of their children to university He tells of the once herring fishing industry exporting to Russia before it declined. And one knows, too, that out from these isles death is always await on the waves. Lurking within the Gaelic songs they sing and the cloth they make.
And what about men’s fashions. My God. Can I with my taste say anything at all. Except that grey herring bone is the all time classic. And there is every season an ivy league check. Unlike the more conservative Europeans, the typical American collection goes the gamut from the gaudy to the sophisticatedly subtle. Bantam weight is now 70 per cent of the Harris tweed total turnover and forms 90 per cent of the American market. But to recite facts and figures is only to demean this cloth. Wait instead with your magnifying glass to take a close peek when next you see it on someone’s back. It’s worthy of such scrutiny. And enjoy your awe. And listen, too. To a voice whispering. Will ye nae come back again. To this passion here. On its lonely bereft moonscape. To the pub, the darts, the songs, the whisky, the warp and weft and beer. The perfume of burning heather. Remember a young friend, standing on a New York street. Displaying his jacket which came from this clime. Out of the spin of a bobbin. Out of the clack of a loom. And upon his back lavishes its draping properties. In all their deeper shades of ecstasy.
1986
PART 7
Dear Old Dublin
Trinity Quatercentenary
It’s a long time now since the ecclesiastical powers of this Irish nation, once immune from public sin, descended to chase The Ginger Man off the Dublin stage for being an insult to religion and an outrage to normal feelings of decency. And a lot of moral water has flowed under the bridge since. While the lonely pilgrimages continue to England for abortions and venereal afflictions multiply, condoms are discouraged. But never forget that this is a singular country where all is opposite to logic. And still the domain of a beautiful funeral that you nearly might wish could be your own. A postal strike rages to stop all the good news you’re expecting in the international mail, but allows the enormous native telephone bill to get through.
This is now a land where women’s liberation has given birth to voices raised in rude suggestion to men as to what they can do with their Friday night after the pub appetites when wives were once driven out quaking in the chill of back gardens or locking themselves for safety’s sake in their water closets. It’s women now who have made their own fists to give himself a round house jolt in his own gob. But also, along with the recent emancipations, other rectifying influences have come. There exists the ultimate contradiction of the Catholic Protestant. A beneficial phenomenon whose number increases. And whose virtuous uncorrupt tweedy behaviour is nearly beginning to set the tone. When suddenly out of the celestial blue, the moral fabric of the Republic is rent in tatters by the storm force gales of scandals, ecclesiastical, industrial and agricultural. The ship of state yawning and groaning as it heaves beneath the massive moral swells, its political and religious hierarchy impugned in the eyes of the people. And as all the banned writers over the years are chuckling behind their computers, and those of them as have already sadly departed and are turning over in their graves to try get a look at the latest headline, it would make you wonder where on this isle could you go in a hurry to find a bit of ethical certitude.
Everywhere you look you find that gombeenism is on the rampage again. Just when you thought that enlightenment had come and the bijou bungalow would be soon stopped from defacing the
landscape and architecture at last had a chance. Could it be that there’s no more to be squeezed out of the once reviled James Joyce and they’re fed up with the expense of unprofitable renovation and preservation of your genuine architectural culture and that the nation is roaring for the bulldozer again. With as a first priority a tourist charabanc highway to gain access to those ash grey hills of Ireland’s sacred monument the Burren. Where from the start of time the winds have hummed across its stones to make music of its loneliness. And where the hushed veils of rain anoint and cleanse all with silence. And can anyone stop them as they go paint a moustache on Ireland’s Mona Lisa.
Ah but by God, with so many things changing for the worse, you’d desperately need to go find some solace from all this urgent dilemma. And I choose to go to Trinity College’s Quatercentenary Ball. Heading out over the pebbles of my drive on a blue skied day motoring by antique Daimler on the straight road to Dublin. And some graciousness is still found as I park myself in the luxury of the Shelbourne Hotel and my car in the cool shadows of the Royal Irish Automobile Club which latter sports one of the last remaining cognomens acknowledging that England once had more than a little to do with this city. As it did with this famed university. On whose ancient grasses, flat green and velvet marquees are set and cricket this day is played in the sunshiny breeze. College gentlemen go by wearing their elegances. Gold watch chains swinging across their crimson waistcoats, straw boaters atop their heads. Their ladies asmile in their long dresses and wide brimmed hats. Music blazes away. I pass among them like the eccentric ghosts of yore who once went here. As I go now in their memory, the loneliest man in the world.
J.P. Donleavy: An Author and His Image Page 22