An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  Phibbs, an Irish Protestant with an English education, was incapable of understanding a situation like this, much less of dealing with it and, left to himself, he would probably have delivered a few well-chosen blasphemies and retired in a huff. I knew that in Ireland you can oppose the clergy only with nationalists, so I introduced Phibbs to another ex-jailbird, Seamus Keely, who taught Irish in the local technical school, studied law in his time off and was on his way to a judgeship.

  Keely was a handsome man, though you could hardly see the good looks for the cloud of melancholy that surrounded him. Even the pince-nez on the end of his nose looked as if it were on the point of committing suicide. When I proposed that he should present himself at the committee meeting as a representative of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, he shrieked with outraged legal virtue; but when I explained that the alternative would be the abolition of the library, the humour of the suggestion dawned on him and he began to giggle. I also warned Phibbs, who would chair the meeting, to insist on a vote ex officio, which seemed to me a match for sine die any day of the week.

  But it was not necessary. The mere presence of Keely, handsome, modest and fresh from an internment camp, and an exemplary Catholic besides, was enough to assure everyone that the Irishman’s simple faith was in no immediate danger. I should add that afterwards Keely, the priest and I became great friends, but the Wicklow County Library owes its existence to a shameless piece of gerrymandering by an Irish judge who was probably even less ashamed of it than I was.

  After that, Phibbs treated me with considerably more respect. What was more important from my point of view was that he showed his gratitude to Keely, though none of us knew that this gentle teacher of Irish would become a judge. Phibbs realized that in our ignorant way we knew things about Irish life that he had never been taught. It was the first time I realized the isolation of the Anglo-Irish, which Elizabeth Bowen once compared to the isolation of an only child. At home, all he had known of Irish literature was Miss Hutton’s version of the Cattle Raid of Cooley – in which he had studied the youthful feats of Cu Chulainn, who drove a sliotar down the hound’s throat and then beat it over the head with a hurley stick, and a patriotic novel by Canon Sheehan called Lisheen, which always lay on the living-room table, because the house was called ‘Lisheen’. He began to sign himself ‘Seathrún MacPhilip’. But he also had the Anglo-Irish incapacity for language, and after attending a few of Keely’s Irish lessons at the technical school, he resigned himself to monolingualism.

  Phibbs became the dearest and best of my friends, and I have had many. I don’t think I ever even showed Wilson a poem, but I showed all my work to Phibbs. He read my poems, which I hammered out on the office typewriter after hours, and marked them all ‘Rubbish’ except a few translations from the Irish, which I felt he accepted more because of the material than the treatment. He called for me each day at my lodgings on his way to work, but Mrs Soames soon stopped this. One day she came into the sitting-room, wailing and wringing her hands, and told me that she was delighted to welcome my friends at the house, but she had to make an exception of Mr Phibbs; he was the Devil. I told this extraordinary rigmarole to Phibbs, who was impressed rather than angry. He may have had a genuine interest in satanism and regarded her as a witch.

  After this, we met at his rooms on the Murrough and drank small glasses of cheap sherry. He had a passion for the destructive criticism of religion, which I did not understand, and I still have his Bible with his exclamatory comments on the improbabilities and improprieties of the first few books – I doubt if he ever read further. He believed that marriage in the modern world was an outmoded institution. He forced Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex on me and was exasperated when I returned it unfinished and commented that it bored me. ‘It is permissible to say one is shocked by such a book,’ he said curtly. ‘It is unforgivable to say one is bored.’ He really enjoyed pornography, and when someone irritated him – which was often – he promptly got his own back by writing some murderous and bawdy satire. I still remember his poem on Robert Wilson’s English wife:

  The night that she, just newly wed,

  Was brought, a blushing bride, to bed

  Hers was so stout a maidenhead

  That all his passion, all her will,

  Left her at dawn a virgin still…

  Yet I, who was so puritanical that I left a room rather than listen to dirty stories, never resented either his blasphemy or obscenity. I think I understood them as the play of a powerful and utterly fearless mind, and to me they were as interesting as the antics of a tiger. I was fascinated by the sheer mental agility that went with his physical agility, which was considerable. Despite his height he walked with short quick steps, changing step frequently to adjust himself to my own long, slow stride. Sometimes I just sat and watched him as though he were something in the zoo.

  He had a sort of animal beauty and a touch of animal cruelty. He had been trained as a zoologist, but his only interest was poetry, and since he simply could not grasp the idea of a foreign language, this meant English poetry. He had joined the British Army as soon as he was old enough, but when a drill sergeant shouted at him: ‘Hi, you! Take that damn thing out of your pocket!’ he had shouted back with equal truculence, ‘What do you mean, calling this book a damned thing? It’s Shelley’s Collected Poems.’ If the war had continued, he would probably have made a very fine officer.

  When he was self-conscious, as he usually was for the first quarter of an hour, particularly if there was someone else in the room, he was stiff, curt and mechanical; but when he relaxed he had all the grace of a thoroughbred. The long lanky hair hung over one eye; the thin lips softened, and you saw the thick, sensual lips of the poet, and he paced round the room with his hands in his trousers pockets, bubbling with boyish laughter. Later, when I read Proust, I knew exactly what Saint-Loup must have looked like.

  He was an Irish country gentleman; so he regarded himself and so he behaved – in the way in which an Irish country gentleman believes an English country gentleman behaves. He gave great thought to questions of precedence, and one night he asked me in great perturbation the meaning of a passage he had been reading in some eighteenth-century book, which laid it down that no gentleman sees his guest to the door. Being a boy from the Cork slums I had no difficulty in explaining to him that this is a butler’s job, and this gave him much food for thought.

  He loved poetry as no one else I have ever known loved it, and he rapidly turned me from a reader of anthologies into a reader of poetry – a very different thing. He loved all poetry, good and bad, famous and forgotten, but he loved the forgotten best, and would come triumphantly back to Wicklow with Poems of Puncture by Amanda McKitterick Ros or the works of Thomas Caulfield Irwin. He had an unerring eye for books, and he must have spent a small fortune on them. Once, in later life, he spotted the Kilmarnock edition of Burns on the shilling shelf and, true to character, instead of buying it he brought the error in valuation to the bookseller’s attention. Once, maddened by people who borrowed books from him and did not give them back, he had defaced them all with a rubber stamp – ‘This Book Has Been Stolen from Geoffrey Phibbs’ – a typical, impulsive bit of vandalism that he must soon have regretted.

  He read everything and studied everything that could conceivably have been called ‘modern’ or ‘advanced’: ballet, painting, sculpture, poetry and (even though he was tone-deaf) music. His favourite modern poet was an American woman of whom we were both to learn a great deal more. In reading, he preferred the difficult to the simple: it suited his agile, inquisitive mind, while I, of course, preferred the simple, above all if it was sufficiently gloomy. We were never in step: he loved bright modern pictures, Braque and Matisse, while I liked Rembrandt: he listened to Stravinsky or Bach on the gramophone, and I hummed the slow movement of the Beethoven C Sharp Minor Quartet; and when he quoted Carew:

  To be a whore in spite of grace,

  Good counsel, and an ugly face,

&nbs
p; And to distribute still the pox

  To men of wit…

  I replied with Landor’s ‘Artemidora, gods invisible…’

  His own verse was comparatively straightforward, and he wrote it every day – sometimes three or four poems at a time – and always off the cuff, sometimes within an hour of whatever incident had excited him. One evening, when we were out walking on the hills over Wicklow, he killed a rat, and the poem followed that very evening; another day, when he was alone, he met Austin Clarke’s wife, Margaret Lyster, and in due course, I got the poem:

  Mister Lyster

  Gave it to me the day she had the blister

  Between Jack’s Hole and Five-Mile Water

  And introduced me to her landlord’s daughter.

  With him, verse was always immediate and spontaneous, and, so far as I could see, complete. The pains and aches of composition, which with me went on year after year, did not seem to exist for him. We would be working together in the office and suddenly he would reach out, grab an old envelope from the wastepaper basket and begin to scribble furiously. Then he would go to the typewriter and type it before he read it to me. I corrected the spelling and grammar, a process that amused and exasperated him: sometimes I thought he mis-spelled deliberately to keep me occupied. ‘You will die of sintactical exactniss of the mind,’ he once wrote to me. ‘I believe it is a very slow and paneful death.’

  Nowadays I wonder if those early poems were not much better than I thought them. Now, at least, I realize how brilliant he was, but then, with my large appetite for melancholy music, I thought the poems too flashy, too topical and, above all, too slapdash; and I longed for the moment when the wit and topicality collapsed and let through the pure lyric tone:

  Now lets laburnum loose all her light golden locks –

  Or –

  O solemn slope of mighty limbs so long accustomed to

  Arcadian rams!

  ‘But I’m not much of an antiquary,’ she said. ‘Oh, no,’ I said,

  ‘you’re still quite young and nice.’

  It doesn’t matter. We were two young poets in love with our trade, and though I wasn’t a real poet I enjoyed it as though I were, and not even one’s first experience of love-making is quite as satisfying as that.

  4

  Thanks to my friendship with Phibbs my position in life suddenly changed for the better. I had to borrow the library bicycle one night each week to cycle seven miles out into the mountains and teach Irish for the sake of the five shillings. My pupil was an old schoolteacher who had to learn Irish to keep his job; he was a kind old man and always saw that I had drunk well before he sent me home. But Phibbs grew very angry when he understood at last how hard up I was, and he wrote a cruel and witty letter to the Carnegie Trust about it. The Secretary replied handsomely by return, apologizing for Lennox Robinson’s meanness, increasing my salary to two pounds ten a week and promising a further increase to three pounds ten when the trustees met.

  Even in Big Business overnight increases of more than a hundred per cent do not often occur, and when they do they do not involve the same distinction between poverty and wealth. I became reckless, and when I went home on holiday got my aunt’s husband, Pat Hanlon, to make me a suit – the first I had owned since I was a small boy – and a shirtmaker to make me two green shirts. These were a tribute to Phibbs, who, as a serious poet, always wore green shirts and a black bow-tie. The problem of how to get a broad-brimmed hat like his had to be deferred till I reached a country where poets were respected and hats made to suit them, but I opened an account at Bumpus of Oxford and ordered a pocket Dante and a pocket Landor. The Dante was my own long-cherished wish, but the Landor was pure Phibbs.

  Naturally I agreed to sign with him a manifesto against Yeats, to whom he had a great aversion, first because the Yeatses had been ‘in trade’, and second because Yeats (who, as I later realized, was half blind and had offended half Dublin by trying to be polite and call people by their names) had addressed him as ‘Coulter’. George Russell, the Editor of the Irish Statesman, made some slighting reference to our manifesto, and Phibbs and I called to protest. Russell did his editing from an attic room in a Georgian house in Merrion Square, which he had papered in brown wrapping-paper and decorated with gods and goddesses in dark browns and gold. He sat behind a large desk to the side of the fireplace – a big, burly North of Ireland Presbyterian with wild hair and beard and a pipe hanging from his discoloured teeth. He usually sat well back in his chair, beaming benevolently through his spectacles, his legs crossed, and his socks hanging down over his ankles. Sometimes in an earnest mood he leaned forward with his two fat hands on his knees, his head lowered as he looked at you over the specs, giving his appearance almost an elfin quality. He was an extraordinarily restless, fidgety man, forever jumping up to find some poem he was about to print (usually lost in the heap of papers, prints and manuscripts in his desk) or some book he was reviewing. With him was his secretary, Susan Mitchell, a deaf woman with a sweet, faded face, who was supposed to have loved him platonically for the best part of her life.

  Phibbs, like many of the younger writers, despised Russell, whom he regarded as an old windbag. I was prepared to do the same, but, while we were still arguing, Phibbs said, ‘The difference between your generation and ours is that we have had no youth.’ ‘Oh, really!’ Russell replied with an air of great concern, and I disgraced myself by a roar of laughter in which Russell joined. One of his favourite quotations was a phrase from the Three Musketeers – ‘I perceive if we do not kill one another we shall be good friends’: and I think at that moment Russell and I decided we should be friends, for as we were leaving he put his arm round my shoulder and said, ‘Send me something for the paper.’

  I did, and he printed it, and another source of income became open to me. Admittedly it was small, but when one has never had anything the occasional guinea or two guineas seems like wealth. I could now spend a night in a hotel – though six and sixpence for bed and breakfast struck me as wicked – so I went to Dublin, mastered even my timidity, and visited him in his house in Rathgar on Sunday evening. I went through the performance I went through so often in later years, climbed the steps, pulled the bell, heard the smelly old dog begin to yelp; and then Russell, shouting and kicking excitedly at the dog, pulled me in by the hand. He had the usual Dublin combination of living- and dining-room, filled with paintings, mostly by himself, and all in glaring colours that matched the glaring overhead light. Corkery, who had once visited him, had told me that the pictures were ‘like Hampstead Heath on Sunday night’.

  For the first hour he sat uneasily in his big chair in the middle of the room, intent on the doorbell, which was always anticipated by the infernal dog. It was like sitting in the middle of Grand Central Station. Visitors to Dublin – American, Japanese and Chinese – were always dropping in, as well as a gang of adoring old ladies whom I called ‘The Holy Women’. He lectured to them all, telling American agriculturists how to organize co-operatives and Indians how to understand Gandhi, and suggesting new themes to poets and storytellers. He talked in set patterns and phrases which had endured for years, some indeed of which could be traced back to his boyhood.

  ‘You know, A.E.,’ I said to him years later, ‘back in 1904 Joyce has you saying: “The only question about a work of art is, out of how deep a life does it spring.” ’

  ‘Well, that’s clever of him,’ Russell replied. ‘That’s true, you know. I may have said that.’

  He said it at least once a day. What was more he did not realize that I was joking him.

  He was a creature of habit, and his conversation, like his life, like his pictures, ran in patterns; well-formed phrases, ideas, quotations and anecdotes that he repeated year after year without altering an inflection. He was unskilful in the way he introduced them, and they were usually so general in their application that they had a tendency to obliterate the point in discussion. ‘Leonardo advised young painters to study the stains in old mar
ble to discover compositions for their own paintings’ was a standard phrase that was exceedingly difficult to relate to any subject one was considering. After a time you got to see Leonardo hovering in the air a mile off and found yourself trying to ward him off as if he were a wasp.

  It was this repetitiousness that got him the reputation of a windbag among people like Phibbs, and I understood the criticism even when I disagreed with it. In fact, Russell was a man of intense intellectual vitality; ideas came to him almost too readily, and his experience, when he chose to draw on it, was profound and varied, particularly when he remembered it casually as a result of something someone had just said and it came to him with the freshness of a theme rediscovered.

  When the occasional visitors left to catch the last tram, and two or three regular ones like Osborn Bergin the philologist and C. P. Curran the lawyer remained behind, Russell ruffled out his beard as though he were expelling the smoke of generalization from it, and the talk – political and literary gossip – improved enormously. When we rose to go Russell cried, ‘Oh, books! You must have books!’ On the left-hand side of the wall between sitting- and dining-room there was a tall shelf of religious books that no one was allowed to borrow; but a big, low bookcase against the wall beside it was free to everybody. Russell, a poor boy himself, had picked up an occasional book in a second-hand store and made his soul on it, learning whole pages by heart (his verbal memory was fabulous), and he knew everyone must love books as he did. He would squat cross-legged before the bookcase, grab a new book and lift his glasses to read from it, his short-sighted eyes skipping from line to line, and then look up at you happily, drooling and beaming.

  ‘Isn’t that good? Isn’t that clever? Don’t you like that? Doesn’t he interest you? Ah, but here’s something you will like.’