Any money left over from his rather good salary was available without interest to anyone who wanted it, and as I was short of money during the first few months of my stay in Dublin, I borrowed from him as well. But he was always getting into trouble because so few of the people who borrowed from him paid him back at the promised time, and sometimes new borrowers appealed to him when he himself was short.
No watch could control this, and once he came to me in great distress. I owed him a couple of pounds which I should pay when I got my first month’s salary, and someone had asked him for money in a hurry at a time when he did not have it. He came to my room, blushing, and asked if I could lend him a pound that evening. If I could he promised to pay it back when he got his own pay on Friday night. At first I thought he was joking and laughed, and this distressed him even more. He swore that only dire need could make him borrow from a friend like myself, and then I realized that he was really in earnest so I only laughed louder than ever, while he went through every gambit of the confirmed panhandler; and the more he tried to persuade me that he was not the sort of person who normally did this, and that he really would pay me back on Friday, the louder I laughed. Nobody else had ever made me laugh so much or with so good a conscience.
But no more than Mother or Minnie Connolly was the Saint anyone’s fool. Like them he was simply a person of spiritual genius who treated money in the proper way. He was always in trouble with his infernal Loan Office, and one day he came to me with a circular which he was proposing to send to all his ancient debtors. It ran something like this, though I suspect the original was much subtler and funnier:
Dear—, I don’t know if you will remember that on… 19…. you borrowed from me the sum of… This letter is not intended as a request for payment, but it would help my book-keeping if you would kindly reply to two questions –
(a) Do you acknowledge the debt?
and
(b) Do you propose to repay it?
It was the most effective dunning letter I had seen, and I am sure the money came pouring in, but the Saint could get his own back on me in exactly the same gentle, subtle way. He kept on trying to persuade me to come to Mass with him, and was not in the least concerned when he did not succeed. God, he explained, knew that I was a very good Catholic – even if I did not know it myself – and would accept a reasonable compromise. So the Saint went to two Masses on Sunday, one for himself and one for me, and on the second occasion explained to God that he was representing me.
This was moral blackmail, but he went one better. He decided that, as one of the few really good Catholics he knew, I should contribute to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, a cause in which I had no interest whatever. We had a thundering row about this in which I accused him of every form of complacency and arrogance, but he won, as usual. He explained quietly that God, knowing me as He did, expected me to contribute to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, so he would add my subscription to his own.
What can you do with a saint? Heine once said that the Celts were the only real believers because you could borrow money from a Celt money-lender and arrange to pay it back in the next life. Maybe in the next life I shall pay back what I owe the Saint, including my subscription to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith – blast it!
But sanctity was not the origin of the trouble I was having with my other dear friend. When he was an assistant like myself, Phibbs had fallen in love with another assistant, whom he had wanted to marry, but since then he had fallen in love with a Dublin painter. It is not an unheard-of situation among poets and, indeed, among others.
He and I had been coming back from a long walk over the hills by Rathnew when he told me. He might have chosen a more experienced adviser. At that time I had kissed three girls, but, after the first, who had splendid Irish, I had found it a rather wearisome occupation. On the other hand, from my considerable reading of French and Russian novels, I felt I had a complete theoretical knowledge of the subject.
‘Tell the first girl to go to hell,’ I said firmly.
‘You cannot do that sort of thing to a girl,’ said Phibbs.
‘In that case you’re going to be pushed into a marriage you don’t want,’ I said.
‘I know that,’ he said irritably. ‘But I don’t know the best thing to do.’
‘The best thing is to ask the second girl to marry you at once,’ I said.
‘Now?’ he asked incredulously.
‘If you really want to marry the girl you may as well do it now as any other time,’ I said, still rejoicing in my infallibility.
‘Oh, of course I want to marry her, but she has to work for a year in London. It seems silly to ask her to marry me just because of another girl.’
‘Try her,’ I said. ‘I doubt if she’ll think it’s so silly.’
I could usually sound very wise, and I must have done so then, for Phibbs went to London over the weekend, and apparently Norah saw things much as I did. When she returned to Wicklow as his wife I was not so sure of my own wisdom. On the first Sunday when I went to lunch there were no potatoes, and I was scandalized when she went on with her painting and allowed Phibbs and myself to go into town for them. I had never met a girl who forgot things like potatoes, and if I had I should have expected her to repair her omission in silence. I thought Phibbs was too easygoing. Besides, Norah got between him and me in ways I had not anticipated at all. I was as jealous as a schoolboy, and sometimes thought that love and marriage had been greatly exaggerated by the poets and dramatists.
The loneliest creature on God’s earth is a young writer trying to find himself, and every few months I took a few days off to stay with the Phibbses, where we talked our heads off into the early hours of the morning about books, pictures, music, religion and sex. I was able to report the arrival at my home in Dublin of the Other Girl’s Brother at about seven in the morning. By this time I had bought myself my first dressing-gown and slippers, and when my visitor proceeded to read Phibbs’ letters to his sister I was able to strike an attitude and say that I did not wish to listen to my friends’ private correspondence. ‘But this is about you!’ he had cried, and went on to read all the witty and malicious things that Phibbs had written of me in the first few weeks of our acquaintance. I thought they were very funny, but managed to remain severe and withdrawn, and the Brother had then set off to drive all day to read to Wilson the references to him – not, I hoped, to read the poem on Wilson’s wife. In fact, I had liked the Brother and wished I could be more openly sympathetic, because secretly I pined for the days when brothers were brothers and an insult to a woman’s honour could only be wiped out in blood.
The Phibbses had rented a little bungalow on a hill over Wicklow town with a garden and a fine view of the sea. Phibbs was happier, more contented, than I had known him, and very proud of Norah – prouder of her than she of him, I sometimes felt resentfully. I was still jealous, and besides I felt he needed a good deal of the sort of admiration that I quite naturally gave him. When we met, there was always an hour or two when he was stiff and perfunctory, but as discussion went to his head the mechanical man dropped away and again he was a creature all fire and air, much as I imagine Shelley to have been.
I had gone after the job in Dublin largely on their account. I planned to have a little flat where they could stay at weekends, and I could join them in Wicklow. When I left Cork for the last time I took the long train-ride round by Waterford so as to spend a night with them. Phibbs met me at the station and we went up the hill to the bungalow together. He was abstracted and short in speech, but I put it down to the usual awkwardness we felt on meeting again, and I was sure that before the evening was over it would wear off. It wasn’t until Norah had gone to bed that Phibbs told me why he was upset. There was Another Man.
Exactly why he chose me for confidant in his love affairs is something I have always wondered about. Ten years later I would have laughed him out of it, but in those years of insecurity light love was as
much beyond me as light verse. Naturally, having listened to his iconoclastic conversation for years, I knew in theory that these things happened, and as a student of the nineteenth-century novel I realized that they were more liable to happen in France and Russia than in England – witness Mme Bovary and Mme Karenina – but, so far as my knowledge went, they did not happen in Ireland at all. Sometimes I suspect that this was precisely why he did confide in me, because, ‘advanced’ as some of his attitudes were, he had others that were not so advanced.
‘Oh, I know what you think,’ he said bitterly. ‘You think I should have shot them both, and that’s how I felt. I walked over the hills like a madman for two days. But that is all only nineteenth-century romanticism. There must be absolute freedom in marriage. That’s all.’
‘Oh, Geoffrey, you bloody fool!’ I said.
I think I began to see then what became clear to me years later, that he was a man who was trapped by his own nature. We are all trapped, of course, sooner or later, but he was more inescapably trapped because in him the gap between instinct and judgement was wider than it is in most of us, and he simply could not jump it. With the two-thirds of him that was air and fire he adopted new attitudes and new ideas, without ever realizing how they contradicted conventions that were fundamental to himself.
Norah was accompanying me to Dublin next morning, on her way to art school in London, and on the train she talked to me about her English friends, each of whom seemed to have Another Man or Another Woman in the background, and I did not wish to say that they all sounded to me as dry as cream crackers. Cream crackers are all very well with morning coffee, but cream crackers for breakfast, lunch and supper as well seemed to me to lack nourishment. So I suffered and sulked the whole way. We went to a party together and said goodbye, she to catch the morning boat to England. By lunch-time I knew she had changed her mind and gone back home, for they both wired me to come down on the evening train. I went round the office singing with sheer relief. The whole thing had been like a nightmare to me.
I suddenly found my whole attitude to Norah changed. Up to this I had been jealous and resentful of her, feeling that she didn’t really value the Ariel she had married. Now I saw that she had done what Phibbs could never do, and I could perhaps do, but only after a long struggle, and jumped the gap between instinct and judgement. Women, I think, can do that sort of thing better than men, but not without a considerable amount of self-knowledge and courage. At this point I began to shift my allegiance; for the first time I began to think as much of her as of him.
By evening there was another wire to say that all had been arranged and that both were leaving for London. I was innocent enough to be glad of that too. But a couple of days later I got a distracted letter from Norah to say Phibbs had gone to live in a flat with two other poets, a man and a woman, both of whom he admired. I also admired the man, but the woman was too modern for my comprehension. To add to the peculiarity of the situation from my point of view, the man had a wife and children who lived on a barge on the Thames.
I could not make head or tail of it. Norah returned, and she, too, seemed to be at a loss. It was part of the cult in this unusual London ménage that Phibbs’ correspondence with me should be supervised as in a seminary, and his letters, which had been explosive and malicious, took on a tone of unction more suitable to a hysterical ecclesiastical student. They were sprinkled with words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but the moral context was missing. Yeats came back from London with a highly coloured version of the story, and Russell was furious with me for having kept it from him.
This wasn’t discretion – nobody has ever accused me of discretion, and that long silence was a strain – but I could not tell it without making it sound like farce, and to me it was not farce, but tragedy, in a language and convention that I did not understand. In my own letters I accused Phibbs of satanic pride and longing for revenge and, though he mocked at me for it, I am sure I was right. He had been hurt and now he wanted to hurt back beyond the point at which revenge is still feasible and one can hurt without injuring oneself more.
Because I knew he was hurting himself, I decided to intervene. I arrived at the flat that the three poets shared one cold and grey Good Friday. I was shaken when Phibbs told me that the Woman poet was at work and must not be disturbed, because even I was observant enough to see the unfinished sentence in her handwriting on the paper before me, with the ink still wet. I was even more disturbed when I lit a cigarette and he told me that she did not like smoking. She disapproved of ashes – and of crumbs, so we should smoke and eat on the barge. The Woman poet later wrote a novel about it in which I appear as Handy Andy, in love with Norah – Yeats, if I remember rightly, being my rival – but Handy Andy would have been sophisticated compared with me at that Mad Hatter’s lunch on the Thames. We drank absinthe and ate salad, and I admired the poet’s wife, so when Phibbs walked with me later to the main road I asked in exasperation why, if he was tired of the perfectly good wife he had, he hadn’t run away with the poet’s wife. I knew nothing of light loves, but I simply could not resist giving my view on them. This, mark you, was the third time I involved myself in Phibbs’ love affairs!
I was in a suicidal mood of loneliness as I walked back down the river to London. The public-houses were shut, so I could not even have a drink. There was a pavement artist on the Embankment who, instead of drawing pictures, wrote out little verses, and it was not till I had passed him that I remembered that one of them was the first of the Irish rebel song, ‘The Croppy Boy’:
It was early, early in the spring
The birds did whistle and sweetly sing,
Changing their notes from tree to tree,
And the song they sang was ‘Old Ireland free’.
I was so homesick that I went back, to give him a shilling and talk to him about Ireland, but I gave up in disgust when I saw that he had changed the last line to ‘And the song they sang was “Old England for ever the Land of the Free”’.
I left for Paris that night, and two days later Phibbs bolted after me, but he was so panic-stricken that he immediately set off for Rouen with Norah. They were followed by the two poets and the poet’s wife, urging him to return; the hotel manager asked them to leave and they continued the scene in a cab which drove round and round the town. By this time I was getting bored. Norah and I with our combined puritanisms wanted it to be serious, but it would not stay serious.
And then, to culminate everything, Phibbs went back to London to say he could not go back, and the Woman poet threw herself out of a third-storey window and was visited in hospital by Phibbs and the poet’s wife, and Phibbs – always attentive to my good advice – set up house with her. In protest against his father’s inhuman behaviour in not having invited her beyond the verandah of ‘Lisheen’, he changed his name by deed poll to Taylor, much in the spirit in which he defaced his books with a rubber stamp. He seemed incapable of withdrawing from a situation when it had become impossible.
After this he taught English for a while in Cairo, but this did not last long either. He found himself at a cocktail party beside a nice man who listened with great interest to his blasphemies and obscenities and asked politely if he was a Communist. ‘Good God, no!’ said Phibbs. ‘I’m an Anarchist.’ The nice man did not say, ‘And I am the Secretary of State for Education’, but he was, and Phibbs had to find himself a job washing dishes in a Cairo hotel. His neighbour and friend in this occupation was the ex-Civil-Hangman of Baghdad, who duly turned up in the batches of poems that reached me.
The poems were not quite so good, and they got decidedly worse after his return to England.
Changing his notes from tree to tree
And the song he sang was ‘Old England for ever the land of the free’.
The atmosphere was too tolerant for his angry, individual humour, or so at least I thought, and he drifted without effort into the attitudes of a mildly eccentric English liberal. As for me, I had made the change to Dublin for no
reasonable cause. Dublin without him was empty; there was no writer of my own age to whom I could say the things I said to him, and when I wrote I seemed to be writing only for myself.
9
Phibbs’ defection made the problem of where and how I was going to live worse. There was no longer a bungalow in Wicklow where I could go for weekends and talk literature, and it seemed pointless for me to rent an apartment, having no one to share it with. Nancy was in Cork, and she was even more evasive on paper than she was in the flesh. Mother was there, and I had more or less determined that I should return there too in a couple of years’ time and do what I should have done in the beginning, buy that house that Father and I argued about.
I was fortunate in my lodgings, and Mother came on visits and became friendly with my landlady, but I was still dissatisfied. I was rising in the world, but I saw no point in it unless I could have the visible signs of it about me – my own furniture and pictures, my own books and records. I still could not see beyond chattels, and I came some terrible croppers in apartments before I realized that they had to have things like bathrooms, kitchens, light and air, and here Mother could not help me at all because she had as little experience of creature comforts as I had.
I wanted to buy a house for the three of us somewhere on the coast, but Father exploded at the very idea of it. He had agreed to everything else, hadn’t he? He had let Mother come and stay with me as long as she pleased. She could go on doing it; he had no objection, but live in a place like Dublin he would not. No more would he come and stay with me for any extended period just to see how he liked it. How could he, with the sort of children that were growing up nowadays, who would wreck his house the moment his back was turned?
It was all true, and I felt guilty about it and sympathized with them in the intolerable separations I inflicted on them; for it would have taken six police to remove Father from his house and more than that to prevent Mother from coming to see that I was all right. Of course, Father was an old soldier and could make himself comfortable in circumstances where another man would perish, but he was even more dependent on her for society than I was. I never had any difficulty in imagining what he felt, having made one of his long pedestrian excursions round the city and filled himself with what for him was hot news – such as how poor Mickie Mac was getting on without the dead sister and what new devilment Gauger in Barrack Street had thought up to plague his respectable daughter-in-law – when he came home to a dark and empty house and had to light the fire and boil the kettle and then read his Evening Echo without a soul he could discuss it with.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 30