An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  By that time other events had me more nonplussed than ever. The manager of the insurance company that handled the Council’s business had called. He was a very nice man, and he made no objection at all to insuring the library premises and stock. Here at last, I felt, was a really sensible man. But a week or two later I received by post a substantial cheque from the insurance company, and it was made out to me personally. I telephoned and was assured that it was perfectly all right. This was the commission on the insurance, and it was correctly made out to me. When I suggested that it should be made out to the Secretary of the Cork County Library Committee, the manager hastily said he would come over and explain it to me.

  I have said he was a nice man, and he did his best for half an hour to make things clear to me, but that day I was denser than usual. The one thing I did gather was that the insurance company could not make out the cheque so that it could be lodged to the credit of the committee because this would be a great embarrassment to other officials. Considering the amount of property that other officials had to insure compared with the library premises, I saw that this might be so, but it didn’t help me about what I was to do with the cheque. The damn thing pursued me for years, and so did the insurance company, begging me either to cash the cheque or give it back. When I left the public service for ever twelve years later I still had it with me.

  I really should have studied Gogol.

  But if I didn’t know what was going on, other people did, or at least affected to do so. There was a small but determined group of old-fashioned Republicans on the Council which did its damnedest to have the Secretary fired, but whenever the battle was pitched the Secretary always won. I saw him at work myself, and his technique was fantastic. He could be dignified. When that failed he could clown, and there is nothing that the majority of men prefer to a clown. When the hunt became too fierce he would grab at a pile of correspondence and say, ‘Gentlemen, in connexion with what we are discussing, I have before me at this minute a letter from the Minister of Local Government’, and then proceed to read a letter which dealt with drainage in Ballymorebingham, and before anyone knew what was happening the representative from Ballymorebingham would be on his feet denouncing the Department of Local Government and taking the heat off the Secretary, who sat listening with an attentive air.

  Then there was the County Council clerk, a small, gentle, inoffensive man, who had appointed himself Grand Inquisitor of Cork County Council. ‘I watch everything they do, Mr O’Donovan. Someone must clean out the Augean stables.’ Once a small businessman rang me up to ask when his account would be paid, and I replied that it had already been approved for payment a month before and sent to the Secretary for endorsement. He asked if I couldn’t get it speeded up, and I asked what the difficulty was in collecting it. He said in that hopeless Irish voice, ‘Look, I’d better come round and explain it to you’ – exactly as the insurance man had said. He came round to see me and I liked him at once though I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said that in order to get his cheque he would have to give somebody a hand-out. I didn’t know what he was talking about even then, and inquired why. He replied that every shopkeeper in Cork had to do it. At this I lost my temper and said I would ring up the Secretary’s office, and if his account was not paid within a week I would report the matter direct to the Department of Local Government. For a while he looked at me incredulously, and then he said, ‘Mr O’Donovan, if you could do that you would have every small shopkeeper in Cork on his knees before you.’ I did not have to do it, because immediately after my first telephone call the account was paid, so I never had the spectacle of the small shopkeepers of Cork on their knees before me to contemplate.

  So naturally I didn’t pay too much attention to the little clerk, though he always managed somehow or other to meet me outside the office with fresh denunciations and fresh threats of reporting it all to the Minister. Perhaps it was just as well that I hadn’t had to protest to the Minister myself, for when the little clerk did report direct to the Minister for Local Government, he was promptly dismissed by sealed order. Left in middle age with nothing, the Grand Inquisitor set out for Dublin to live with his sister and devote his gentle, God-fearing life to showing up the Minister. When I moved to Dublin myself, he came along regularly to tell me how his great case against the Minister was going. Usually he came when I finished work and walked home with me, the happiest man in the world because he was sacrificing himself for the only thing he cared about – France. ‘Ever since I was a boy I have loved France,’ he would proclaim dramatically, stopping on the pavement and beaming at me. It was France he was dreaming of when he tried to tidy up the tangled affairs of the Cork County Council, France he was dreaming of when he switched his attention to the whole country.

  I sometimes wanted to hug him as he trotted along beside me with his glowing face, happy and doomed. For I, too, wanted to do something about the country.

  When at last I had got the library organized I realized that I had to have closer contact with the country branches. I bought a van to carry the book boxes about – I did not realize the necessity for a proper travelling library until this was under way – and Cronin, my assistant, and myself drove all over the country in it. This was another eye-opener. It made me realize that I was a townie and would never be anything else. In the best of the houses I visited – usually the houses of people who had been prominent in the Troubles – the people were better related to the wild country about them than I was to the tame city about me. Seeing them in Cork in their uncouth clothes with their uncouth accents was one thing; seeing them on their own farms was another thing entirely, and it made me conscious of my own uncouthness rather than theirs. But those families were few, and the total effect of the country on me was one of depression.

  It was as much to escape from the unreality of my work as for any other reason that I started a dramatic society in the city. There had been no such thing since Corkery had organized his little theatre twenty years before. There was the Cork Operatic Society, which in the usual way of provincial societies performed a Gilbert and Sullivan opera once or twice a year, with the aid of an English producer. There was also a local Shakespearean Society, run by a priest, which performed Shakespeare with the dirty words left out. We held our drama meetings in the old Women’s Prison where Sean Neeson gave us space.

  I knew even less about the theatre than I did about being a librarian, but I read and re-read every textbook on the subject and learned how to make scenery and organize the lighting – that is, if you could get a proper lighting set, which I never could, so that even today the one part of a production which I shall have nothing to do with is the lighting.

  Our first production was to be Lennox Robinson’s Round Table – one of his functional comedies, which could be transferred to an English provincial production by the change of a few town names – his personal names were strictly inter-racial. I found suitable actresses very hard to get. The heroine is a determined bossy type, but that type seemed to be quite unknown to Ireland. The moment you put an Irish girl on the stage and told her to say: ‘Now, have you all washed your hands?’ she instantly realized that there was something slightly improper about addressing men in this tone and became either coy or wheedling. I did it for them, but that only made them more embarrassed than ever and they became practically tearful. I had just decided to give it up as a bad job when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a good-looking girl with an atrocious stammer. ‘W-w-w-would you m-m-m-m-mind t-terribly if I t-t-tried that part?’ she asked with a determined air. I decided that she was pulling my leg and said without looking round, ‘Well, you can’t be worse than the one that’s doing it.’ She got up and did it as though all her life she had been doing nothing else. Nancy McCarthy became my leading actress.

  After this we produced The Cherry Orchard. I think I had been toying with The Playboy of the Western World because either then or soon afterwards we rehearsed it, but the results were too horrible.
I realized during these rehearsals that a writer writes not only for a particular group; he writes for a particular accent. Everybody in Dublin suffers from adenoids, so Synge had no difficulty in finding actors who could sustain a long, unbroken line through speeches in the manner of Racine, but the Cork accent goes up and down, up and down, and I could find no actor or actress who could sustain a note even during a brief speech.

  I had to be content with naturalism and even naturalism involved me in difficulties. One of the lessons I learned during The Cherry Orchard production was that my translation of the Russian names had not taken me far enough into the whole business of theatre. There were ‘versts’ and ‘roubles’, and, just as I did not know from my training as a librarian that the one thing I needed was to get into immediate communication with my readers, so as a budding man of the theatre I didn’t know that there is no way of getting an actor to say ‘verst’ and ‘rouble’ as though he knew exactly what it meant, nor is there any way of making contact with the audience except through its own knowledge of life. I saw it all quite clearly in that wonderful scene of the two sisters chattering in the dawn with the shepherd’s pipe sounding in the distance. The only trouble was that I had no method of making a sound like a shepherd’s pipe or, even if I had, of getting an audience to identify it as a shepherd’s pipe. I could not believe but that I could master that pipe and give the same unearthly effect to a Cork audience that it must have had for a Russian one. I still did not realize what I was to argue later, against Yeats and everyone else in Dublin, that theatre is a collaboration between author, actors and audience, and when that collaboration ceases to exist, theatre ceases to exist.

  It is clear I didn’t recognize it then, because I went on with A Doll’s House. But from other things I was beginning to realize that Cork standards of literature and my own could not exist for long side by side. I had got a hint of this when our Ranevskaya confessed she couldn’t say the line ‘At your age you should have a mistress’. Then the young newspaperman who was playing the part of Firs supported her with his own argument. This was that, as the nephew of the Dean, he could not possibly tolerate such a line being spoken. I should have given up at that point, because the priest who conducted the Shakespearean Society was also attacking us in print and complaining that instead of the uplifting plays of Shakespeare we wanted to produce the filthy works of Sean O’Casey. As a result our leading man failed to turn up at the dress rehearsal. He sent a message that he had a toothache, and when one of the group went to his lodgings, it seemed that the toothache was so bad that he couldn’t come to the first night either. Hendrick had to postpone the show until Tuesday and that night he and Nancy worked for hours trying to teach me the part.

  In those couple of years I published two or three stories, one of them, ‘Guests of the Nation’, in the Atlantic Monthly. Nevertheless, as I have said, I did not enjoy my years in Cork, because it was no longer the place I had known. O’Faolain was in America and I found it impossible to talk to Corkery. He was too gentle and considerate to be rude, but he made it plain that he was taking sides and that I was on the wrong one. I was restless and felt that Cork was threatening to suffocate me. I suffered from a sort of intellectual schizophrenia, living for the few days in the year when I could get up to Wicklow, talk literature and art to the Phibbses, and go on to Dublin and see Russell and Yeats. Russell could give me all the latest books and gossip, and of a Sunday evening I could go to the Abbey Theatre, where the Dublin Drama League was putting on a remarkable series of continental plays, Chekhov, Strindberg and contemporary German plays in which Phibbs’ friend, Denis Johnston, was a leading figure.

  I had also fallen in love in a completely hopeless way with my leading lady in the dramatic society. I had been reading Chekhov’s love letters to Olga Knipper and probably felt I needed an actress of my own. Nancy was not in the least like Knipper. She was a pharmacist and very conscious of her responsibilities, and as well as that she was a very pious Catholic. When people complained of prescriptions she went to St Peter and Paul’s to pray. When they took legal proceedings she made a novena. For a year or more I always seemed to be meeting the girl outside St Peter and Paul’s. I gave her Chekhov’s letters to Knipper, but they seemed to have no effect. She just wouldn’t marry me.

  Even so, when I applied for a job as municipal librarian in Dublin, I still had the notion that I should do it only as a temporary expedient until a similar job turned up in Cork. Nothing could cure me of the notion that Cork needed me and that I needed Cork. Nothing but death can, I fear, ever cure me of it.

  TWO

  The provincial in Dublin

  8

  I had been ill in Cork, and Russell, distrusting all Cork people, including doctors, had made me come to Dublin and get examined by his own doctor, Frank Purser, the only medical man he trusted. ‘He cured Stephens. Stephens was dying when Frank saw him first, and now he can eat beef-steaks.’

  When Russell heard that a new appointment was to be made in Dublin, he went wild and besieged a couple of government departments, assuring them that I was the only possible candidate, though whether this did me good or harm I never knew. but I got the job – organizing the library at Pembroke. When I saw the new library I was to work in, I cursed. It was a miniature Georgian version of a Dublin library of 1880, which in its turn had been copied from some English library of 1840.

  Pembroke, like Rathmines, was one of the old townships that disappeared a few years later in Dublin city; it had a substantial Protestant population, and I found myself with a committee which was neatly balanced but small enough to be practical. I made my first friend in a boy who came to me looking for a job, supported by the local Labour Party. I sent him to see my chairman, who ran an automobile business in Dublin. ‘But don’t you realize that he’s a Freemason?’ the boy asked. ‘Never mind what he is,’ I said. ‘I want him to support you when the committee meets.’ He went off in the spirit of the Light Brigade, but next day the ‘Freemason’ came in and said, ‘I thought that was a fine lad you sent to see me yesterday. He’s getting my vote.’ He did get the chairman’s support, which was just as well for me and the library, as the Labour vote happened to go elsewhere. By a bare majority vote Dermot Foley became my assistant.

  After Cork it was wonderful. Dermot was a musician, and we built up a music library that we could be proud of. I was a language enthusiast, and we built up a foreign library which attracted those French, Germans and Italians in Dublin who could find nothing in their local libraries. We bought an epidiascope and a cheap gramophone, and each week we talked to the children about pictures and classical music until the Dublin Corporation took over, removed our epidiascope and gramophone and sent Gaelic League lecturers who talked about Red Hugh O’Donnell and life in the Gaeltacht until they drove the kids away.

  I had a room in Sandymount Green in a big house kept by a Donegal man and his sister who had retired to enjoy themselves in the great city. I do not think they enjoyed themselves much, because all their talk was of Donegal. I was never much in love with Dublin, but I thought they were unfair to it and said so.

  ‘Ah, but you still have your dreams, Mr O’Donovan,’ said the sister, her eyes filling with tears.

  I liked them, but I adored my fellow lodger. He was an engineer, tall and dark and handsome, with grave manners and an enchanting smile. He was a saint as Mother and Minnie Connolly were saints, but a masculine version of the type.

  I am a heavy sleeper, and I had an arrangement with him to wake me each morning on his way to Mass, but I slept so heavily and he woke me so gently, touching me with his fingers and then smiling into my face to reassure me, as one wakes a baby, that I did exactly what a sensible baby would do and went off to sleep again.

  This caused him great scruples of conscience, because he had trained himself to leap out of bed at the first sound of the alarm clock by imagining that the bed was on fire. He was now training himself to wake immediately before the alarm clock went off, which he a
ssured me was not so difficult as it sounded; and he felt sure that by waking me in this childish manner he was sapping my willpower. Everybody, from Corkery on, seemed to be concerned about my will-power.

  He then made me prepare a card reading ‘Please Wake Me at 7.30’, which I had to hang on the door handle before going to bed. He said that this made all the difference between a real act of the will and an automatic gesture, but I could not see that it improved my character in the least. All that really happened was that I usually forgot to hang it up.

  Everything in the Saint’s life had been reduced to schedule, even the walk from Sandymount Green to the Star of the Sea church, which was so many hundred steps and took so many minutes and seconds, measured by the watch on which everything was tested – exactly the complaint that a writer of the early Middle Ages makes of the Irish monks and their arithmetical piety. When we went for walks, I was a sore trial because I stopped to speak to anyone I knew, but those foolish, social conversations interrupted the flow of the Saint’s thought, and he walked on to the next corner. Waiting for me while I chattered worldly irrelevancies was almost as bad as listening to them, because it threw out the whole mathematical quality of the walk, and after a while he explained to me that he would continue his walk at exactly the same pace – so many steps to the minute – and by quickening my own pace slightly, say by three steps to the minute – I could easily catch up on him. Running, of course, he neither expected nor approved of. Running and thinking were incompatible.