‘Read that, boy,’ he whispered. ‘That’ll show you what the country is really like.’
The book was Waiting by Gerald O’Donovan, an interesting novelist now almost forgotten. He was a priest in Loughrea who had been carried away by the Catholic liberal movement and the Irish national movement. Later, in disgust with his bishop, he became an army chaplain, married, and wrote a number of novels that have authenticity without charm. I read the book with great care, though a boy who didn’t know what a foreskin was had little chance of understanding what the country was like. Yet I remember that particular checker for the breath of fresh air he brought for a moment into my life, with its guarantee that the reality of dockets and invoices, smart boys and foul-mouthed workers, was not quite as real as it seemed.
There was one further small reference to the world I really believed in in a kilted man who appeared one day at the office counter, apparently about some missing goods but who refused to speak English. Cremin came back from the counter, looking red, and reported to my boss. Obviously, this was a very tasteless joke, and the boss shot out, adjusting his pince-nez with the air of a man who never stood any nonsense. But it was no joke. French the visitor would speak if he was compelled, but Irish was the language of his choice, and nobody in the office except myself spoke a word of French or Irish. Nobody outside my boss and the other tracers even bothered to jeer me about my weakness for Irish, though one clerk, a small prissy man with pince-nez, did once sniff at me and ask me what literature we had in Irish to compare with Shakespeare. For a few minutes there was consternation as the clerks discussed the irruption. ‘All right, Native,’ the boss said at last with the air of a man setting a thief to catch a thief. ‘You’d better see what he wants.’
Of course, the stranger turned out to be an Englishman, the son of an Anglican bishop, who was enjoying the embarrassment he was causing in an Irish railway station by speaking Irish when the only person who could answer him was a messenger boy. And, indeed, the matter didn’t end there, because the Englishman had to put in his claim, and put it in Irish, which I had to translate into English, and the clerks decided to get even with him by making me also translate the official reply into Irish. Of course, he was a sport and I was a fool, but the little incident was a slight indication of a revolution that was already taking place without the smart boys even being aware of it.
It was also an indication of the extraordinary double life I was leading, a life so divided against itself that it comes back to me now as a hallucination rather than as a memory. Usually, there is some connexion between the real and imaginary worlds, some acquaintance in whom the two temporarily merge, but when I left the railway I did not leave a friend behind me and never so much as inquired what had happened to any of the decent people I knew there. One life I led in English – a life of drudgery and humiliation; the other in Irish or whatever scraps of foreign languages I had managed to pick up without benefit of grammar, and which any sensible man would describe as daydreaming, though daydreaming is a coarse and unrealistic word that might be applied by sensible men to the beliefs of the early Christians. That was the real significance of my passion for languages: they belonged entirely to the world of my imagination, and even today, when some figure of fantasy enters my dreams, he or she is always liable to break into copious and inaccurate French – the imagination seems to have no particular use for grammar. Irish was merely the most convenient of these escape routes into dreams, and that was why, on Saturday nights, with a German book from the Carnegie Library under my arm, I attended lectures in the Gaelic League hall in Queen Street, or stood admiringly in a corner listening to my seniors discussing in Irish profound questions such as ‘Is Shakespeare national?’ and ‘Is dancing immoral?’ or perhaps ‘Is dancing national?’ and ‘Is Shakespeare immoral?’ I still had no education, except such as fitted me for the byways of literature like Shakespeare, or the company of the ordinary girls I met, but these I was too shy or too ignorant to compound for, so I read Goethe a few lines at a time with the aid of a translation, or a page from some obscure novel in Spanish, and adored from afar beautiful university girls I should never get to know. Even Turgenev, who became my hero among writers, I read first only because of some novel of his in which there is a description of the Rhineland and German girls passing by in the twilight, murmuring ‘Guten Abend’.
This, of course, confined my education mainly to poetry, which has a simpler working vocabulary, based on words like Herz and Schmerz, amour and toujours, ardor and rumor, of which I could guess the meaning even when I hadn’t a translation. I had taken a checker’s discarded notebook from the storage shed and, having patiently rubbed out all the pencil notes, made a poem book of my own in all the languages I believed I knew. Though my love of poetry sprang from my mother, my taste, I fear, was entirely O’Donovan. Nature would seem to have intended me for an undertaker’s assistant, because in any book of verse I read I invariably discovered elegies on dead parents, dead wives and dead children and, though my knowledge of poetry expanded, that weakness has persisted, and my favourite poems would be bound to include Bridges’ ‘Perfect Little Body’, Landor’s ‘Artemidora, Gods Invisible’, De La Mare’s mighty poem on the suicide that begins ‘Steep hung the drowsy street’, Hardy’s great series on his dead wife, and a mass of Emily Dickinson. And though I was stupid, and went about everything as Father went about putting up a shelf, I did care madly for poetry, good and bad, without understanding why I cared, and coming home at night, still corpse and brass band, I spoke it aloud till people who overheard looked after me in surprise. And this was as it should have been. On the night before his execution at Tyburn Chidiock Tichbourne wrote: ‘My prime of life is but a frost of cares,’ and on the night before his in Kilmainham Patrick Pearse wrote: ‘The beauty of this world hath made me sad.’ When life is at its harshest, ‘when so sad thou can’st not sadder be’, poetry comes into its own. Even more than music it is the universal speech, but it is spoken fluently only by those whose existence is already aflame with emotion, for then the beauty and order of language are the only beauty and order possible. Above all, it is the art of the boy and girl overburdened by the troubles of their sex and station, for as Jane Austen so wistfully noted, the difficulty with it is that it can best be appreciated by those who should enjoy it the most sparingly.
It was a strange double life, and small wonder if it comes back to me only as a hallucination. Each morning, as I made my way across the tracks from the passenger station in the early light, I said goodbye to my real self, and at seven that evening when I returned across the dark railway yard and paused in the well-lit passenger station to see the new books and papers in the railway bookstall, he rejoined me, a boy exactly like myself except that no experience had dinged or dented him, and as we went up Mahoney’s Avenue in the darkness, we chattered in Irish diversified by quotations in German, French or Spanish, and talked knowledgeably of Italy and the Rhineland and the beautiful girls one could meet there, and I recited Goethe’s poem that in those days was always in my mind – the perfection of the poet’s dream of escape:
Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blueh’n,
Im dunklem Laub die Goldorangen glueh’n.
I know I often hurt Mother by my moroseness and churlishness when some innocent question of hers brought me tumbling from the heights of language to the English that belonged to the office and the store. And between Father and myself there was constant friction. Father was a conservative, and he knew the world was full of thieves and murderers. He wouldn’t go to bed like a sensible man and let me lock and bolt the doors and quench the lamp. He and Mother might both be burned alive in their beds. But when I went out for an evening walk I hoped frantically to rescue some American heiress whose father would realize the talent that was lost in me or, failing that, to tag along behind some of the senior members of the Gaelic League and try to talk as grown-up as they seemed, and often I wasted my precious couple of hours, walking up and down the Western
Road and meeting nobody who would even speak to me. As I came up Summerhill the pleasure of being all of a piece again was overshadowed by the prospect of the morning when once more I should have to part from the half of me that was real, and it was like a blow in the face when I found the door locked, and Mother came scurrying out to open it for me.
‘Don’t say a word, child!’ she would whisper.
‘Why?’ I would ask defiantly, loud enough to be heard upstairs. ‘Is he on the war-path again?’
‘Ten o’clock that door is locked!’ Father would intone from the bedroom.
‘Ah, don’t answer him! Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Better fed than taught!’ Father would add, as he had added any time in the previous ten years.
When my first wretched effort at composition appeared in a children’s paper and word of it got round the office, everyone was astonished, but most of all my boss. He was a decent man, and a clever one, and he knew better than anyone that I was definitely not a smart boy. I remember him sitting at his high desk with the paper open before him and a frown on his bulgy forehead as he nervously readjusted his pince-nez.
‘Did you write this, Native?’
‘Yessir,’ I said, feeling I had probably done it again. Everything I did only seemed to get me into fresh trouble.
‘Nobody help you?’
‘No, sir,’ I replied warily, because it looked as though someone else might get the blame, and I still clung to the code of the boys’ weeklies and was always prepared to own up. The frown deepened on his fat face.
‘Then for God’s sake, stick to writing!’ he snapped. ‘You’ll never be any good on the Great Southern and Western Railway.’
And that, as we used to say, was one sure five. As usual, looking for models of fine conduct, I had hit on a left-wing time-keeper who knew all the Italian operas by heart and made it a point of honour not to take off his cap before the bosses. Seeing that anyone who knew so much about opera must know the correct thing for other situations, I decided to do the same, with results that may be imagined. Even then, I should probably have been let off with a reprimand, because I had no self-confidence and merely went about blindly imitating anyone and anything, in the hope of blending somehow into the phantasmagoria, but, with my bad sight, I had also fallen over a hand-truck and injured my shin so badly that I couldn’t walk for weeks. But on the railway bad sight was more serious than bad manners, because it might result in a claim.
On the Saturday night I was sacked I read my first paper. It was in Irish, and the subject was Goethe, For me, my whole adolescence is summed up in that extraordinary evening – so much that even yet I cannot laugh at it in comfort. I didn’t know much about Irish, and I knew practically nothing about Goethe, and that little was wrong. In a truly anthropomorphic spirit I re-created Goethe in my own image and likeness, as a patriotic young man who wished to revive the German language, which I considered to have been gravely threatened by the use of French. I drew an analogy between the French culture that dominated eighteenth-century Germany and the English culture by which we in Ireland were dominated.
While I was speaking, it was suddenly borne in on me that I no longer had a job or a penny in the world, or even a home I could go back to without humiliation, and that the neighbours would say, as they had so often said before, that I was mad and a good-for-nothing. And I knew that they would be right, for here I was committing myself in public to all the vague words and vaguer impressions that with me passed for thought. I could barely control my voice, because the words and impressions no longer meant anything to me. They seemed to come back to me from the rows of polite blank faces as though from the wall of my prison. All that did matter was the act of faith, the hope that somehow, somewhere I would be able to prove that I was neither mad nor a good-for-nothing; because now I realized that whatever it might cost me, there was no turning back. When as kids we came to an orchard wall that seemed too high to climb, we took off our caps and tossed them over the wall, and then we had no choice but to follow them.
I had tossed my cap over the wall of life, and I knew I must follow it, wherever it had fallen.
FOUR
After Aughrim’s great disaster
15
Once again I was without a job. Like the old men whose landladies and daughters-in-law turned them out in the mornings, I made the Public Library my headquarters, and continued to read through the advertisements for a smart boy, though I realized that I was ceasing to be a boy and would probably never be smart. Then I went out and wandered aimlessly about the town in hope of meeting someone who would talk to me, and even maybe give me a cigarette. It was a dreary existence, because Father kept on asking what I was going to do with myself, and I had no notion. It was no use telling him that eventually I hoped to find a job that would suit my peculiar brand of education or meet some rich girl who would recognize my talents and keep me in decent comfort till I established myself. She didn’t have to be very rich; my needs were simple; only a trousers without a patch on the seat of it, so that I could be seen with her without embarrassment, and an occasional packet of cigarettes. Father, having returned from the War with a disability pension to add to his service pension, was past arguing with – a man who had really set himself up for life!
It was a period of political unrest and, in a way, this was a relief, because it acted as a safety valve for my own angry emotions. Indeed, it would be truer to say that the Irish nation and myself were both engaged in an elaborate process of improvization. I was improvizing an education I could not afford, and the country was improvizing a revolution it could not afford. In 1916 it had risen to a small, real revolution with uniforms and rifles, but the English had brought up artillery that had blown the centre of Dublin flat, and shot down the men in uniform. It was all very like myself and the Christian Brothers. After that, the country had to content itself with a make-believe revolution, and I had to content myself with a make-believe education, and the curious thing is that it was the make-believe that succeeded.
The elected representatives of the Irish people (those who managed to stay out of gaol) elected what they called a government, with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs that tried in vain to get Woodrow Wilson to see it, a Ministry of Finance that exacted five to ten pounds from small shopkeepers who could ill afford it, a Ministry of Defence that tried to buy old-fashioned weapons at outrageous prices from shady characters, and a Ministry of Home Affairs that established courts of justice with part-time Volunteer policemen and no gaols at all.
It all began innocently enough. People took to attending Gaelic League concerts at which performers sang ‘She Is Far from the Land’, recited ‘Let Me Carry Your Cross for Ireland, Lord’, or played ‘The Fox Chase’ on the elbow pipes, and armed police broke them up. I remember one that I attended in the town park. When I arrived, the park was already occupied by police, so after a while the crowd began to drift away towards the open country up the river. A mile or so up it re-assembled on the river-bank, but by this time most of the artistes had disappeared. Somebody who knew me asked for a song. At fourteen or fifteen I was delighted by the honour and tried to sing in Irish a seventeenth-century outlaw song about ‘Sean O’Dwyer of the Valley’. I broke down after the first verse – I always did break down whenever I had to make any sort of public appearance because the contrast between what was going on in my head and what was going on in the real world was too much for me – but it didn’t matter much. At any moment the police might appear, and this time there could be real bloodshed. It was sheer obstinacy that had driven respectable people to walk miles just to attend a concert they were not very interested in, and they paid their sixpences and went home, rightly feeling that they were the real performers.
It was the same at Mass on Sunday. The bishop, Daniel Coholan – locally known as ‘Danny Boy’ – was a bitter enemy of all this pretence, and every Sunday we had to be ready for a diatribe at Mass. It was as upsetting as discovering that the Invisible Pre
sences still regarded us as traitors for, though I knew that Ellen Farrell and her husband had defied the Church in Parnell’s day, I had had no expectation of ever having to do so. The priest would turn on the altar or ascend the pulpit and start the familiar rigmarole about ‘defiance of lawful government’, and some young man would rise from his seat and move into the nave, genuflect and leave the church. Suddenly every eye would be turned on him, and even the priest would fall silent and wait for the interruption to end. Then there would be a shuffling of feet in one of the aisles, and a girl would rise, genuflect and leave as well. Sometimes this went on for minutes till a considerable group had left. They stood and talked earnestly in the chapel yard, all of them declared rebels, some perhaps marked down for assassination, till the priest finished his harangue and they went back. Naturally, I always joined them, hoping for a nod or a smile from one of them.
It was childish, of course, but so was everything else about the period, like the little grocery shop you saw being repainted and the name on the fascia board changed from ‘J. Murphy’ to ‘Sean O’Murchadha’. One can still almost date that generation by its Liams, Seans and Peadars. I suspect that in those few years more books were published in Ireland than in any succeeding twenty years. Not good books, God knows, any more than the little papers that kept on appearing and being suppressed were good papers. But they expressed the mind of the time. One paper I still remember fondly because it proposed that English as a ‘secondary’ language be dropped in favour of French. In those days it struck me as an excellent idea. The impossible, and only the impossible, was law. It was in one way a perfect background for someone like myself who had only the impossible to hope for.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 16