An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

I don’t think I ever left that house or the office without an armful of books, good, bad and indifferent, and later, when I was in hospital, Russell continued to send me regular parcels of them – ‘to raise your soul above the troubles of the flesh’ as he would explain.

  He was that sort of man. Within half an hour he enveloped you in universal curiosity and affection in which shyness was forgotten. It was like an old fur coat, a little bit smelly and definitely designed for someone of nobler stature, but, though it might threaten you with suffocation, it never left you feeling cold. He would find you a new doctor, a new wife, a new lodging or a new job, and if you were ill would cheerfully come and nurse you.

  I did not quarrel with friends like Phibbs who resented the old fur coat, but I, who found it hard enough to write a letter and almost impossible to wrap up a parcel, appreciated the fury of affection that went into all that vague letter-writing, picture-giving and parcel-sending. It all came out of a great emotional abundance like that of one of the nineteenth-century writers he loved so much – Hugo or Dumas – and it was always a mystery to me how that emotional volcano poured forth only little twelve-line lyrics in which every second word was vague and literary.

  As all Russell’s discoveries had to be pronounced on by Yeats, Russell ordered me to visit him on one of his Monday evenings. In those days Sunday was Russell’s night, Monday Yeats’, Tuesday afternoon Sarah Purser’s, Sunday afternoon Seamus O’Sullivan’s. Yeats’ Mondays were peculiar because they were all male; on Monday nights he discussed sex, except when Lady Gregory was staying, and, of course, it would be my rotten luck to be ordered to the presence when she was staying and no one else came, so that I had to face Yeats and herself alone. At that time I did not know Mrs Yeats, who could manage to make even me feel at home. To complete my confusion, Lady Gregory wore a mantilla as though for an audience with the Pope.

  It was all too much for a raw youth who was terrified of social occasions anyhow. Yeats’ study was kept deliberately dark, and everything in it was expensive and beautiful; the masks from his dance plays, the tall bookcases with the complete sets of the classics, and the long, orderly table with the tall silver candlesticks. Even Corkery could not have said that the pictures were ‘like Hampstead Heath on Sunday evening’. And nothing less like Russell could be imagined than the tall man in the well-cut blue suit with the silk shirt and bow-tie who came shuffling in, holding his hand out high as though he expected you to kiss his ring – a beautiful ring, as it happened. Never could you imagine an Irish countryman giving Yeats an approving look and shouting, ‘Bring in the whiskey now, Mary, and be continually bringing in the hot water’, which was how Russell was received in one Irish town. Later, the very sight of Yeats at the door would send Mother scuttling to her bedroom. There was something ecclesiastical about the blind man’s stare, the ceremonial washing of the hands and the languid unction of the voice. That night I noticed that he said ‘weld’ and ‘midder’ for ‘world’ and ‘murder’.

  There was a touch of the bird about him as well; the eyes, like those of a bird, seemed to be at the sides rather than the front of the face, and his laugh tended to be harsh, abrupt and remote – a caw, as Moore called it. When he was happy and forgot himself, animation seemed to flow over him. He sat forward, arms on his knees, washing his hands over and over, the pose sometimes broken by a loud, harsh, throaty laugh and the tossing back of the big bird’s head while he sat bolt upright in his chair gripping his lapels and raising his brows with a triumphant stare; sometimes he broke it by tweaking his nose; most characteristically perhaps by raising his index finger for attention. But when he was really excited his whole face lit up as from a light inside. It was astonishing, because even in old age when he was looking most wretched and discontented that blaze of excitement would sweep over his face like a glory, like a blast of sunlight over a moor, and from behind the mask a boy’s tense eager face looked out at you. I had already noticed with Lennox Robinson the way you could see under the mask to the boy beneath. In Robinson the boy was a practical joker; a brat who had already done something terrible to your bed; but the boy behind Yeats’ mask was one who had been kept in on a summer day and looked at you, trapped and despairing, from his bedroom window.

  It was a while before I realized that Yeats was a desperately shy man who had the effect of driving other shy people slightly dotty as he drove me that night and many a night after. I am not saying that Russell was not shy – poets, after all, are not made of brass – but shyness was forgotten in the folds of the old fur coat, which, I fancy, was the thing about him that Yeats hated most. To Yeats, Russell was as much mob as man. Yeats loved the half light, Russell the full light, though Yeats was an infinitely more observant man than Russell; and if you had the misfortune to bore him you were perfectly well aware that he had marked you down as an enemy and would remember it against you in time to come.

  In spite of the blindness, in spite of the shyness that made it impossible for Yeats to use Christian names, he was extraordinarily watchful and observant. Within the first half-hour George Russell would smother you with curiosity, affection and kindness, but I never felt that these bright, kind, honest eyes saw me at all; while Yeats, apparently blind, bored and bad-tempered, astonished me by his apparent familiarity with my life, my work and my friends.

  ‘I know Strong is a great friend of yours, O’Connor,’ he said one night many years later, ‘but he bores me.’

  The important thing to me was not that Strong bored him, but that he remembered that Strong was a friend of mine and was quite ready for an argument. On another night he said, ‘I see the Censorship Board has banned the book by So-and-So – the fellow who stole your story.’ I didn’t know that anyone had stolen that particular story;* it has been stolen so often since that even the newspapers comment on it, but Yeats was the very first to notice the plagiarism.

  There was no doubt as to which was the easier to make friends with, Russell or Yeats. That first night Lady Gregory and himself were putting me through my paces. Lady Gregory asked me to say some modern Irish poem, and I said Father Paddy Browne’s translation of a poem of Gogarty’s, which is better than the original. Then I spoiled it all by telling how another travelling teacher of Irish like myself – Dick Murphy – whose small salary often went unpaid, tried to eke it out by producing his own translation of Lady Gregory’s Workhouse Ward, but, being too poor to pay the royalties, re-titled it Crime and Punishment. Translated from the Original Russian of Fyodor Dostoevsky. I know it was not a tactful story to tell before the author, but I was embarrassed, and anyhow I still like ‘from the Original Russian’.

  ‘And didn’t he know it was wrong?’ Lady Gregory asked bleakly, in that flat, peasant accent of hers, and this ruined the rest of the evening for me.

  It was no comfort to learn a few days later that Lady Gregory was re-telling the story all over Dublin or that Yeats had said my conversation was ‘profound’. What I needed was that big, smelly old fur coat.

  5

  I was now comparatively well off, but the job of librarian in Cork County was coming up, and I dreamed of it. To my surprise Russell was violently opposed to my taking it at all. There were other jobs I could get within twenty or thirty miles of Dublin and he wanted me to apply for one of these: then I should be on the spot if a job turned up in Dublin itself, and meanwhile could spend my weekends in town. He simply could not understand that I did not particularly want to live in Dublin, and he had the lowest view of Cork.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he said dogmatically, ‘you wouldn’t be able to stand that hole for six months.’

  What astonishes me now, looking back on the period, is that I did not even understand what he was getting at. Is it that young writers have no sense of fear? I was prudent enough. When I used the pseudonym ‘Frank O’Connor’ (my second name and my mother’s maiden name) I left myself a loophole against the sort of mistake Lennox Robinson had made when he published his silly little story under his own name while stil
l Secretary of the Irish Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, but the real dangers I did not see at all, then or for years later. Cork was to me merely my material, the place I knew best, and it never occurred to me that that particular material could ever have any effect on me, or that I might eventually find myself in the position of Heine’s monkey chewing his own tail – ‘objectively he is eating, subjectively he is being eaten.’

  And yet, during my time in Wicklow, I could see the consequences of this restrictiveness all round me. There was the problem of getting local sanction to establish our libraries, which was not made any easier by Robinson’s ‘crime’. Some of the priests would allow no libraries at all. In Rathdrum, a town up the country from us, the parish priest initially resisted all our efforts to start a branch library. At last I decided that the time had come to visit him. Phibbs and I called first on the curate, a splendid young fellow who was in despair with the parish priest and with Ireland. A couple of nights a week he went off to the local technical school and took off his coat to practise carpentry so as to encourage the unemployed lads of the town to learn a trade, all to no purpose.

  ‘You’ll go up to that parochial house,’ he said, ‘and see the old man at the table with his dinner gone cold and a volume of Thomas Aquinas propped up in front of him. And between you and me and the wall,’ he added, ‘Thomas Aquinas was a bloody old cod.’

  We found the parish priest exactly as the curate had predicted, Aquinas and all, but there seemed to be nothing of the obscurantist about the delightful old man we met. On the contrary, when we introduced ourselves, he beamed and regretted that we hadn’t come to lunch. He took a particular fancy to me because I spoke Irish, and he was devoted to Irish and Irish literature. In fact, one of his dearest friends had been George Moore. Poor George. Of course he had been greatly wronged in Ireland, where people did not understand his work, but George had been a really dear and good man.

  I didn’t, of course, believe for an instant that he had been friendly with George Moore, but if the illusion made him more tolerant of our business it was all right with me. But when I introduced the subject I saw at once what the curate had meant. Oh, libraries. Libraries, hm! Well, libraries, of course, were wonderful things in their own place, but town libraries were a great responsibility. It was all very well for sophisticated people like ourselves to read the works of dear George, but could we really thrust them into the hands of simple Irish townspeople?

  I damn near told him that from the little I knew of simple Irish townspeople they could give us all odds, but I knew this would get us nowhere. Charm was the thing, and charm won us permission at last, but only if the curate took full responsibility and satisfied himself of the innocuousness of the books we sent out. Swift wondered how it was that every virtuous English bishop translated to Ireland was murdered on Hounslow Heath and his place taken by a highwayman, but I wondered what happened to those nice, broadminded young curates one met after they became parish priests.

  Nevertheless I was beginning to suspect that as an authority on Irish ways I was a wash-out. And now I had another shock coming to me, because, as we left, the parish priest said to me, ‘I know you’ll be interested in this,’ and handed me a presentation copy of The Untilled Field, in Irish, with an affectionate inscription by George Moore.

  ‘It’s all very well for you, O’Donovan,’ the travelling teacher said testily one night as we were standing on top of the stairs together, holding our candles and speaking in low voices so as not to disturb the Soameses. ‘You don’t know what life in this country is like. I can keep it up for a few years more, but I know damn well the way I’m going to die. I’ll be dodging up to the church three or four times a day to say a prayer, and looking at the other side of the street when I meet some old friend that might be a temptation to me.

  ‘That’s the way my father died, and my father was a very intelligent man. He was one of a crowd in Limerick, and none of them believed in anything either. One of them – a fellow called Cremin – went to the States. They were all very fond of him. But you know the sort of thing that happens. One by one they got married and settled down and went to Mass, and they were ashamed of their old friends too, the way I’ll be.

  ‘And then, long after, Cremin wrote to say he was coming home. He was after making a bit of money and he wanted to retire to Limerick. Father was delighted. He couldn’t believe that the good old days weren’t going to come back. They were all delighted; they all liked Cremin, so they arranged for a big car to take them to Queenstown and meet the liner.

  ‘Well, Cremin came ashore as sprightly as ever. They’d arranged for a dinner at the Commodore, and they made speeches about Cremin and their youth, and he got up to reply, and, begod, didn’t he drop dead across the table!

  ‘They brought him home that night and buried him, and after the funeral Father invited a Redemptorist back to the house, and from that day till the day he died we were never without a priest in the house. And I tell you, O’Donovan, that’s the way I’m going to the too. You mark my words!’

  But why should I mark them when the very same thing was taking place under my eyes in the Soames household? Neither Mrs Soames nor her son was very pious. In fact, Mrs Soames was a most superior woman. I think she had been parlour-maid in some Wicklow big house and married the coachman. In spite of her rigmarole about Phibbs being the Devil, she had a good natural intelligence, and hers was the only Catholic lodging-house I ever knew that wasn’t cluttered up with holy pictures and statues.

  Then we had a Redemptorist mission in the town. The women’s turn came first, and each night Mrs Soames hobbled off to the church and she confessed and communicated like everybody else. She was no zealot, but like any other woman she did not want to be different.

  But before the women’s mission ended at all it was clear that there was trouble in the house. From the sitting-room I could hear herself and Bill arguing in the kitchen, her voice shrill and querulous and Bill’s deep and mournful. When she brought in my glass of milk she was full of complaints. Bill refused to go to the mission at all. According to himself – and, knowing Bill well, I believed it – he had done no harm to anyone and had nothing at all to confess. What harm could he do, cycling out at the crack of dawn, wet or fine, miles out in the country and only seeing Bridie for one evening a week? Besides, it was too bloody silly. That was more or less the way I felt myself, but Mrs Soames seemed to feel that it was a matter of maternal discipline and that he mustn’t make a show of her before the town.

  The night the men’s mission opened I heard the row going on in the kitchen. Bill, with his deep husky voice, sounded like a cow that was being driven to the knacker’s. His mother scolded and hounded him out, and then watched from the front door to make sure he did not bolt down some lane to the quays.

  I followed to see the fun, but it wasn’t very funny. The Redemptorist had one of those thick pulpit voices that bellowed till it bounced and then dropped to an awed whisper. He described to us what he obviously thought was how Voltaire died, knowing he was damned, and screaming, screaming for the priest who never came. As I emerged from the church the town atheist approached me.

  ‘How did you like God’s representative telling those damned lies?’ he hissed angrily.

  ‘He probably believed them himself,’ I said.

  ‘He never read a line of Voltaire’s in his life,’ said the atheist in a fury.

  Then I saw Bill, and his whole face was lit up.

  ‘How did you like that, Bill?’ I said.

  ‘Finest bloody sermon I ever heard in my life,’ Bill said enthusiastically. ‘Aha, that fellow knows how to talk.’

  For the rest of the week his mother had no trouble in getting Bill shaved and dressed for the show. As a disciplinarian she might have taken alarm at this, but we are always blind when our temperaments are rushing us to a crisis. Nothing dawned on the poor woman until Saturday night, when Bill came home and told her he was getting married at once. The priest had given him a terri
ble time in confession, and asked him what he meant – a grown man with a steady job – indulging in occasions of sin with poor Bridie for fifteen years. Finally he had threatened Bill with a terrible death – by drowning, no less, though how Bill could get drowned in his daily excursions to the farm was not clear. Down, down, down he could go, and then rise again for a moment with outstretched hands, gasping for air – Voltaire himself had nothing on Bill. After a dreadful fifteen minutes Bill had slunk out of the church, convinced that everyone was looking at him and blaming him for some terrible crime he had never committed.

  At first Mrs Soames was her usual sarcastic self and asked whether he had told the priest that he only earned twelve shillings a week – it may have been fifteen or eighteen, but it was in that neighbourhood. Bill replied that he had and the priest had said it didn’t matter. Only then did the immensity of the disaster become clear to Mrs Soames. Her Boy, whom she had looked after and bullied and defended from designing women, had slipped out of her hands into those of a priest, and not even the poor decent Kerry priest she could pin the blame on, but a nameless Redemptorist who was here today and gone tomorrow.

  For hours I heard the voices going on in the kitchen and felt ashamed to pass them on my way up the stairs. Finally, when Bill had gone to bed, Mrs Soames came in with my glass of milk and wept and wrung her hands. She had met the fate of every strongminded woman and found an adversary stronger than herself. When she had tried to talk to Bill about money, all he had been able to do was to cover his eyes and describe the horrors of drowning.

  ‘And when I asked him how they would live, he said Bridie would have to go on working. And when the children start coming? I said, and all I could get out of him was “God will provide”. He will, I hear! I know who’ll do the providing, Mr O’Donovan. I will. I’ll have to take them in, and give them your room, and then the children will come and I’ll have to mind them as well.’