An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  Far from being recognized as a genius at the school, I was obviously regarded as a complete dud. The reason for this did not dawn on me till years had gone by. All the other students had had a good general education, some a university education. I talked Irish copiously, but nobody had explained to me the difference between a masculine and feminine noun, or a nominative and dative case. Nobody explained to me then either, probably because the problem of a completely uneducated boy masquerading as a well-educated one was outside everyone’s experience.

  And yet, the whole country was doing the same, and Hurley, who gave the impression of having served his time in a West Cork drapery store, was on his way to one of the highest ranks in the army. My friends in the school were a Dubliner called Byrne and a Kerryman called Kavanagh. Byrne was doubly endeared to me because, though only a boy scout, he had already been involved in a pistol fight with a police patrol. Some hunger striker had died in prison and was being given a public funeral, so the three of us demanded the afternoon off to attend it, and fell foul of Hurley, who objected to what he called ‘politics’ in the school. When the time for the funeral came the three of us got up to leave the class and Hurley, in a rage, dismissed it. We were expecting trouble, and Byrne had a revolver. The imaginary revolution was taking shape as well.

  I was lucky to return to Cork with a certificate that made me a qualified teacher of Irish – which I was not – and for a few weeks I cycled eight or ten miles out of the city in the evenings to teach in country schools by lamp-light. But already even this was becoming dangerous, and soon curfew put an end to my new career as well. I seemed to be very unlucky with my jobs.

  At the same time I was making friends of a different type. One evening a pale, thin-lipped young clerk in an insurance office, called Jack Hendrick, came to see me with an introduction from Corkery and proposed that the two of us should start a literary and debating society. Our conversation was rather at cross-purposes, for he did not seem to have read anything but d’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature and he continued to quote this to me as I quoted Turgenev and Dostoevsky to him. He didn’t seem to know about them, and I had never heard of d’Israeli, so I agreed to borrow it from him and meanwhile lent him Turgenev’s Virgin Soil and Gogol’s Taras Bulba. When we met again I admitted that I was bored with d’Israeli, and he said he thought Turgenev was ‘cold’. We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, but I needed a friend too badly to reject one merely because he said outrageous things about Turgenev, and Hendrick was exactly the sort of friend I needed because he had every virtue that I lacked and was well-mannered, methodical, cool and thoughtful. He had a neat, square, erect handwriting that I greatly admired for its legibility, and I set out to imitate it as I had imitated Corkery’s monosyllabic articulation, but I was too restive to do anything that required exacting labour, and Hendrick’s handwriting was a career in itself.

  I explained to him that I now had a chance of a teaching job, but it meant I would have to ride a bicycle, and I had been assured by the man who had tried to teach me that I had no sense of balance and would never be able to ride. I had accepted this without question because it was only one of the dozen things I had been told I couldn’t do. I couldn’t sing; I couldn’t pass an examination; I couldn’t persevere at a task – naturally I couldn’t ride a bicycle. That evening Hendrick brought his sister’s bicycle out the Ballyvolane Road, put me up on it, unclenched my fists on the handlebars, and when we came to the first long hill, gave me a push that sent me flying. I was a mass of bruises when I picked myself up at the foot of the hill, but when I wheeled back the bicycle, Hendrick, who by this time was sitting on the grass by the roadside, smoking, took out his cigarettes and said with a pale smile: ‘Now you know how to ride a bicycle.’

  But even this was of less importance to me than the fact that I was beginning to make friends away from my own gas-lamp. It was probably this that Blake had in mind when he said that if only a fool would persevere in his folly he would become a wise man, because sooner or later the imaginative improvisation imposes itself on reality. But it is only then that its real troubles begin, when it must learn to restrain itself from imposing too far, and acquire a smattering of the practical sense it has rejected. That, I think, is where the Irish Revolution broke down. The imagination is a refrigerator, not an incubator; it preserves the personality intact through disaster after disaster, but even when it has changed the whole world it has still changed nothing in itself and emerges as a sort of Rip Van Winkle, older in years but not in experience. This sets up a time lag that can never be really overcome.

  Friendship did not make me wiser or happier, for years of lonely daydreaming had left me emotionally at the age of ten. I was ashamed to admit that there was anything I didn’t know, and one evening when Corkery talked to me about a story of Gorky’s in which there was a eunuch, I was too mortified to admit that I didn’t know what a eunuch was. I was morbidly sensitive, jealous, exacting, and terrified of strangers. I did not merely make friends; I fell in love, and even the suspicion of a slight left me as frantic as a neurotic schoolgirl. The attitudes of the ghetto survive emancipation, and I had only to enter a strange house or talk to a stranger to make a complete fool of myself. From excessive shyness I always talked too much, usually lost control of myself, and heard myself say things that were ridiculous, false or base, and afterwards remained awake, raging and sobbing by turns as I remembered every detail of my own awkwardness, lying and treachery. Years later, when I was earning money, I never went to a strange house without first taking a drink or two to brace me for the ordeal. Whether that was much help or not I do not know. It is enough that the things I said when I was slightly intoxicated were never quite as bad as the things I said when I wasn’t.

  As if this weren’t enough, I was also going through the usual adolescent phase of snobbery and was ashamed of my parents, ashamed of the little house where we lived, and when people called for me, I grabbed my cap and dragged them out anywhere, for fear Father should start telling funny stories about his army days or Mother reveal that she was only a charwoman. With me, of course, this was also complicated by the number of things that really humiliated me, like my clothes, which were decent but patched, and the fact that I could never get on a tram without first scanning the passengers to make sure there was no girl aboard whose fare I should not be able to pay. As a result I never got on a tram at all until the moment it started to move, and tried to find a seat where no one could come and sit beside me. Then if I continued to look out at the street till the conductor had gone by, I was safe.

  My fight for Irish freedom was of the same order as my fight for other sorts of freedom. Still like Dolan’s ass, I went a bit of the way with everybody, and in those days everybody was moving in the same direction. Hendrick did not get me to join a debating society, but I got him to join the Volunteers. If it was nothing else, it was a brief escape from tedium and frustration to go out the country roads on summer evenings, slouching along in knee breeches and gaiters, hands in the pockets of one’s trenchcoat and hat pulled over one’s right eye. Usually it was only to a parade in some field with high fences off the Rathcooney Road, but sometimes it was a barrack that was being attacked, and we trenched roads and felled trees, and then went home through the wet fields over the hills, listening for distant explosions and scanning the horizon for fires. It was all too much for poor Father, who had already seen me waste my time making toy theatres when I should have been playing football, and drawing naked men when I should have been earning my living. And this time he did at least know what he was talking about. For all he knew I might have the makings of a painter or writer in me but, as an old soldier himself, he knew that I would never draw even a disability pension. No good could come of such foolishness, and it would only be the mercy of God if the police at St Luke’s didn’t blame him for my conduct and write to the War Office to get his pensions stopped. The old trouble about locking the door at night became acute. Ten o’clock was when he w
ent to bed – earlier when curfew was on – and the door had to be fastened for the night: the latch, the lock, the big bolt and the little bolt. When I knocked, Mother got out of bed to open it, Father shouted at her, and she called back indignantly to him not to wake the neighbours, and whispered in anguish to me: ‘Don’t answer him whatever he says!’ But stung in my pride as a soldier of Ireland, I often did answer back, and then he roared louder than ever that I was ‘better fed than taught’. Mother’s sympathies were entirely with the revolution, and he would have been more furious still if he had known that not long after she was doing odd errands herself, carrying revolvers and despatches. Or maybe he did know and, like many another husband, decided to ignore her minor infidelities.

  I was changing, but though I did not realize it till much later, Corkery was changing, too, in an infinitely subtler and more significant way, and the man I loved was turning into someone I should not even be able to understand. I was merely puzzled and hurt when one night he said: ‘You must remember there are more important things in life than literature.’ I knew there weren’t, because if there were I should be doing them. That change goes farther back than the period I am writing of, and was not perceptible until years later. It is not in his novel, The Threshold of Quiet, but it is already adumbrated in the first story of A Munster Twilight. In this a worldly farmer wishes to plough the Ridge of the Saints – sanctified ground – but his old farmhand, steeped in traditional pieties, refuses to do it. He taunts his employer by offering to plough the Ridge if the farmer will put his great sire-horse, Ember, to the plough. At the end of the story the old farmhand yokes the sire-horse and the mare, whose name is Beauty, and goes out at nightfall to plough the Ridge, the horses quarrel and horses and man are hurled together over the cliff.

  This is a typical bit of symbolism that seems to sum up a deep personal conflict. It describes the suicidal destruction of the creative faculty as an act of revolt against the worldliness of everyday life. ‘There are more important things in life than literature.’ Scores of other modern writers like Ibsen and James have used such symbolic equations as a way of trying out their personal problems, but this one seems to me to describe what really happened. It is as though the imaginative improvisation of the community had begun to dominate the imaginative improvisation of the artist and make its fires seem dim by comparison. Of course there must have been some more immediate cause, and I sometimes wonder whether it was not Corkery’s friendship with Thomas MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney. MacCurtain’s murder aroused the country and MacSwiney’s death on hunger-strike was watched by the whole world and cost the British Government more than a major military defeat. It seems to me now that Corkery’s admiration for the two men may have made him feel that men of action had more to give than the mere artist like himself. His admiration for the men of action is in The Hounds of Bamba, the book of stories he was writing at the time, and there are stories in this that repeat the symbolic equation of the horses. One, for instance, describes how a jockey, who is also a traditionalist, takes up a bet made by his half-witted employer, rides a famous horse along the cliffs, and then wrestles with the horse and throws him bodily over the edge into the sea. Even in the stories where there is no symbolism there is a celebration of imaginary heroes and an attack on imaginary enemies who are not far removed from windmills. And Corkery knew his windmill-fighters, for once when we were looking at a picture called Don Quixote he said sharply: ‘Those eyes are wrong. They’re looking out. Quixote’s eyes looked inward.’

  I do not blame myself for not understanding and sympathizing with what was happening to him, because it was precisely the opposite of what was happening to me. He was a man who, by force of character, had dominated physical difficulties, family circumstances and a provincial environment that would have broken down anyone but a great man. Breen, who gave the impression of being opposed to him, cursed and raged whenever he described Corkery’s suffering in the teachers’ training college they had attended together, and I am certain that this sprang from Breen’s own clear eye and passionate heart rather than from any self-pity on Corkery’s part. Nowadays I remember how his mind seemed always to brood on self-control, as when he described how he had written his novel, getting up each morning at six, or wrote to me when I was in prison, quoting Keats on the beneficial effect of a shave and wash-up when one’s spirits were low, or praised Michael Collins, who had made himself leader of the whole revolutionary movement because he was up answering letters when everyone else was in bed. He was as shy and reserved as Chekhov and never asked for sympathy, but behind words like these one could detect a whole lifetime of self-control. Yet he did not, as a lesser man might have done, lose generosity in speaking of an enemy or gentleness in rebuking a friend. He would gaze at me gloomily, and predict in his harsh, unmodulated voice that I would go through life without ever finishing anything, and then add ‘like Coleridge’, awarding me a valuable second prize. I have described how he ticked me off for reading Wilde, because it would injure whatever style I had. Yeats had exactly the same trick. When he was forming his Academy, even before I had published a book, he and I quarrelled about the constitution of the Academy and he muttered: ‘Why worry about literary eminence? You and I will provide that.’ Of course it was guileful, and in a lesser man it might have been the basest flattery, but I understood it in him as in Corkery as the desperate attempt of the elderly and eminent man to break down the barriers that separated him from youth and awkwardness. Because of that Corkery developed an authority that was like Yeats’s. If, as I now fancy, he was impressed by Mac-Swiney’s sacrifice, it was probably because MacSwiney’s remarkable self-control and self-denial had given him an authority beyond his intellect and gifts, but Corkery’s self-control was of a rarer kind. However little he said, and however insipid what he said might seem, it was on his judgement that we all relied, and I think that in the way of those who combine self-control and humanity, austerity and sweetness, he was full of a consciousness of his own power he would have been much too shy to reveal. Only once did he let anything drop that suggested it, and that was one evening when I suggested that great writers might be more careful of what they did and said if only they remembered the sort of people who would write their lives, and he shrugged and replied: ‘Well, I know people will write my life…’

  That is the period when I best like to remember him. After a cruel day’s teaching he would take his paints and sketchbook and trudge miles into the country with me at his heels. I would quote a line or two of Omar Khayyám, and at once he would take alarm lest any fledgling of his should be taken in by something less than a masterpiece. ‘What is it about Fitzgerald that’s not quite right?’ he would ask, and I, as well-skilled in the responses as any acolyte, would reply: ‘Well, it is a bit sugary, isn’t it?’ ‘It is on the sweet side,’ he would say thoughtfully, as though the idea had only just occurred to him, and then, seeing the gable of a cottage in the evening light, he would climb laboriously over a stone wall and search for a dry stone to sit on, cracking jokes about his own softness. ‘Turner, of course, sat in a wet ditch to paint.’ Then, in the late evening he stood at the door of his little house, leaning against the jamb to take the weight from off his bad foot, his hands in his trousers pockets and his small, dark, handsome head thrown lazily back as he talked endlessly about writers and writing, lost to everything else, a man mad on literature. And remembering him like this I find myself humming the song I made Hendrick teach me: Herr Walther von der Vogelweid, der ist mein Meister gewesen.

  But self-control like his exacts a terrible price from the artist and already, like the king in his own play, weary of struggle with the world, he must have been brooding on abdication before those who seemed to exercise real authority, even though it could never be more than a shadow of his own.

  16

  Then came the Truce. It was an extraordinary event that deserves a whole book to itself, though, so far as I know, no one has ever tried to describe it. It had all bee
n announced and prepared for, but it was quite impossible to believe it would really happen. Then, a little before noon on Monday, July 11, 1921, when I was still a few months short of eighteen, a slow procession of armoured cars, tanks and patrols began to move back on Cork Barrack, and I walked along beside it. There were little crowds in every street, all watchful and silent, since everyone realized that anything might yet happen. Then, as the Angelus rang out from the city churches, the barrack gates were thrown open and tanks, armoured cars, officers and men filed in. Here and there a man would turn and give a derisive hoot at the silent crowd. Then the barrack gates closed, and the crowd began to move away quietly with bewildered looks. Did it really mean that it was all over? That there would be no more five o’clock curfew and that one could walk that night as late as one pleased without being shot? That one could sleep in one’s own bed? That it really represented the end of seven hundred years of military occupation, the triumph of the imagination over material power, the impossible become law?