But I was as helpless against his complacency as he was against my restlessness, and for a month or six weeks at a time Mother would come and stay with me in Dublin, and Minnie Connolly, the saintly old maid at the other side of the square, would trudge over to listen to Father’s news and report to Mother on how he was doing; and when he wasn’t ‘keeping too good’ – her euphemism for going on a drinking bout – Mother would grow fretful because she felt that no one else could understand him or deal with him in that state, and she would go home before her visit was up.
Father and I shared her in the way that men in Phibbs’ circle in England were supposed to share some woman while remaining fast friends, but my experience with him had not persuaded me of the possibility of such friendships, and anyhow Father and I were not in the least sophisticated. He was just patiently waiting for some nice girl to marry me and get me out of his hair so that he could have Mother in peace for the rest of his days, while I was hoping by firmness (insisting on my own share of her) and kindness (showing him the considerable advantages of living with me) to wear him down. We were both tolerant, considerate and even generous, but each of us knew that this particular doll belonged to him, and, indeed, it seems to me to say a lot for us that we never really came to blows over her.
At last he agreed to come to Dublin for a few days. He was generous; he did, once started, enjoy free excursions, particularly to a place such as Dublin, where he had been stationed as a young soldier, and he would have a great story for the other old sweats who gathered for Mass on the Sand Quay, but he wanted to make it clear from the start that these would be only excursions and would involve no liability to buy.
He arrived in Dublin with his itinerary in his head. As I remember it, it did not include any tourist monuments and was confined to five military barracks and one cemetery. Each day he set off to perform it on foot, a fine-looking old six-footer with his cap pulled over his eyes, striding along like a boy, interested in every detail. One barrack he visited because he had been stationed there himself, another because my Uncle Tim had been stationed there, a third because some girl he had once tried to pick up in O’Connell Street had said, ‘They’re a nice lot in the Wellington Barrack’, a very ordinary remark which he had trotted out for forty-odd years as though it were a gem of wit. Glasnevin Cemetery he revisited because as a young man he had attended a funeral there and been interested in the graves of the Irish leaders O’Connell and Parnell.
For some reason I decided to go to Glasnevin with him – possibly because he had tried to get there and lost his way. As we came to the Crossguns Bridge he identified the Brian Boru bar with a grin. Obviously he knew it of old. On the way back he stopped outside it.
‘You’ll have a little drink?’ he asked uneasily.
He might well be uneasy, because he knew what I thought of his drinking bouts, and I might have been angry or rude, but there was something wistful about his tone which suggested to me that this might be an occasion.
‘Very well, we will,’ I said, and we went in and stood at the bar. Father continued to make the pace.
‘What will you have?’ he asked in a lordly way. ‘You’d better have a bottle of stout’ – meaning that with a father as broadminded as himself I need not pretend that I did not drink, and I had the impression that if I refused the stout he would be bitterly hurt.
‘Stout will be fine,’ I said nervously.
‘A stout and a bottle of lemonade, miss,’ he said to the barmaid and then over our drinks he talked to me pleasantly as man to man. Curiously, the conversation has completely left my mind, which shows how disturbed I was, but I fancy he was giving me advice on how to handle Mother – a subject on which, like all husbands, he considered himself an expert. It may have been then that he broke the news to me that Mother was a good deal older than himself and very close to qualifying for the old-age pension.
Being an orphan, she hadn’t the slightest idea of when her birthday was or even what her age was. If she was pressed, she would describe her age as ‘about sixty’, leaving it to mannerly people to say they would never have believed it. But Father was convinced by something my Uncle Tim O’Connor had let drop – no doubt in his well-meaning effort to keep the two of them apart – that Mother was close on seventy and would sacrifice a perfectly good pension of ten shillings a week from mere vanity.
Father, as I have explained, had an absolute mania about pensions. He had wangled two out of the British Government, one for long service and another for a non-existent disability. My Uncle Lar, of course, being the smart man he was, had wangled a total disability pension for asthma, which he had always suffered from and which he could re-energize immediately before a Board by running up Patrick’s Hill where the doctors’ houses were, but Father always admitted that his brother was a cleverer man than he was. He was looking forward to doing a bit of wangling on the Irish Government as well; he would not, of course, get the full ten shillings, but every little helped. It was the nearest thing he knew to an unearned income and the status of a gentleman, and there was much in his attitude to remind me of the retired businessman with his securities. It was not all jam, of course; it had its little tragedies. Lar could get total disability when there was nothing whatever wrong with him, but Father would come back from one of his sessions outside the Sand Quay church, gloomy and disturbed because some old soldier had got total disability, and the other old sweats recognized that he would not be with them for long.
But mainly it was the decency of the British Government that he recognized. Here he was, in his sixties, and he could make his daily tours of new building sites and talk patronizingly to the labourers, who would never be able to do the same, but would have to work until they dropped and died in the workhouse. And – as with the retired businessman – there was something ambivalent about Father’s friendliness towards the labourers. He was genuinely sorry that they had to go to the workhouse, unlike himself, who could go up to the British Army Hospital in Shanakiel; but he was also proud and pleased that it was they and not he who had to do it.
He had done his best to implant the same sound Conservative principles in Mother, and he simply could not understand that no good-looking woman, however intelligent, wants to be seventy, merely for the sake of ten shillings a week. Now if Father had explained that he only wanted to prove she was fifty, she would have entered into the search with the enthusiasm of a girl, but, as it was, she just listened inattentively to him and continued to look a good ten years younger than himself.
When I tried to pay for the drinks he said nonchalantly ‘No, let me do this’, and I realized that this, too, was part of the ritual, and probably rehearsed days before. He returned home with me that evening, full of high spirits. He didn’t, of course, tell Mother about our little adventure. It was also part of the ritual that you did not tell women what men did when they were out together. It was perfectly easy to rationalize. It was a warm day, and The Boy was thirsty. Ritual is only a linking of the dead with our daily actions, but whom among the dead he was trying to impress that afternoon is something I shall never know – his own father, perhaps, or someone he had drunk with there when he himself was The Boy. I only know that I was deeply moved because the little scene had shown me all that had been missing in our relationship and how inspiring it might have been.
It did not, of course, mean that he softened in the least in his objection to living in Dublin with me, or even to staying one day longer than he had bargained for. Sometimes I wonder if he was not afraid that – as with the drink – the first surrender would turn him into an abject old man.
What he felt like at being separated from Mother I could imagine because I had felt it myself, but it never occurred to me that he could feel the same about Cork till one evening when he was staying with us in Glengarriff. For some reason he had been quite reckless and agreed to come for a fortnight, but on the third evening, when he had inspected all the roads out of the little seaside village, I heard him muttering to Mother
, half in amusement, half in chagrin:
‘My God! Another ten days in this misfortunate hole!’
10
For the first two or three years in Dublin, I organized my library and wrote two books: Guests of the Nation, the book of Civil War stories from lodgings in Ranelagh; the novel, The Saint and Mary Kate, from my first flat in Anglesea Road, which was neither cheerful nor comfortable, but where at last I had my own books, records, pictures and furniture about me. I still considered myself a poet, and had little notion of how to write a story and none at all of how to write a novel, so they were produced in hysterical fits of enthusiasm, followed by similar fits of despondency, good passages alternating with bad, till I can no longer read them.
All the same, for all its intolerable faults, I knew that The Saint and Mary Kate was a work of art, something I had never succeeded in producing before, and as I wrote it, I read it aloud to Mother, who either went into fits of laughter or looked puzzled and said restlessly, ‘Well, aren’t you a terrible boy!’ It became the principal argument of the pious Catholics against me, and at one library conference in Cork I had to sit and listen to a denunciation of it as a scandalous and heretical work by the editor of the ‘Three Thousand Best Books’, who was so drunk that he could not stand straight on the platform.
George Russell enthused about it, not with the enthusiasm of a schoolteacher whose favourite pupil has passed an examination with honours, but with that of an inhibited man who rejoices in any sort of emotional outpouring – the excitement he displayed over Hugo and Dumas. He was passionately inquisitive about the character of the heroine, and a dozen times at least brought the conversation round to what she would be like to live with. This was something I didn’t know myself, because I wasn’t really writing about any woman in particular – I didn’t know enough of them for that – but about that side of women that appealed to me – the one that has no patience with abstractions. I, of course, was full of abstractions.
Russell was extraordinarily inquisitive about women, and with an ingenuousness that even I found upsetting. Though he never talked to me of his wife, and only rarely of one of his sons, I had the feeling that he was unhappy in his marriage and inclined to think that women were a plague.
‘Do you have flirtations with pretty girls?’ he asked me one night.
‘Sometimes,’ I admitted – I should have hated to confess how rarely.
‘And do they get you to write poems for them?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s fine,’ he said happily. ‘Write them all the poems they want, but take care they don’t marry you. That’s the devil of it.’
When he came back from his first American tour he was in a wild state of excitement about American girls. He had spent a birthday in Vassar or some other women’s college and the girls had made him a birthday cake with a great mass of candles. Afterwards, one of them had come up and kissed him, and when he started, said, ‘Oh, boy, do be your age!’
‘They must be the most beautiful girls the world has ever seen,’ he said to me. ‘If only you could get them to sit in a corner and keep quiet, you could admire them for hours. But they will talk!’
At the same time he tried to arrange a marriage between Simone Tery, a beautiful French journalist, and me. He showed his love for Simone as I never knew him to show love for anyone, but knowing his passion for generalization I assumed – quite correctly, I think – that I was not the only young Irish writer he had chosen as a husband for her. He merely adored her, and wanted somebody in Dublin to marry her so that he could be sure of entertainment one evening a week. He got off on the wrong foot with Simone and myself, because when we met for dinner he looked at me and said, ‘Isn’t she nice?’ and then at Simone and said, ‘Isn’t he nice?’ and for the rest of the evening we sat and glowered at one another. He made it worse by congratulating her on not using ‘any of those horrible cosmetics that American girls ruin their beauty with’, and she, made up as skilfully as only a Frenchwoman can be, modestly lowered her eyes and said, ‘I only use them on particular occasions, A.E.’
He was very impressed one night when I repeated a bawdy story a girl had told me and said with great solemnity: ‘That is a wonderful example of the economy of Nature which I am always impressing on you. Nature intended me to be a lyric poet, so I never met a girl who told stories like that. She intended you to be a realistic novelist, so she just throws girls of that sort in your way.’
I might have said that one reason I did not meet more girls like that was that I saw too much of people like himself. It is the real weakness – if it is a weakness – of the Mother’s Boy. It is not that he is not attracted to women, but that he is liable to get into emotional relationships with older men. And Russell suffered as well from a frustrated paternalism towards younger men that was strange in one who had two quite attractive sons of his own. I thought I observed it one night when I got him to talk of the youth of Padraic Colum. Usually he talked in set speeches, which could be very boring, but occasionally, when his memory was jogged by love or hate – or disappointed love, as when Yeats had got beneath his skin again – there was an astonishing change, and you realized that you were dealing not with a pathetic old man, but with a firstrate mind. I had never known him more master of his own cool and sympathetic intelligence than that evening when he sketched for me the picture of an enchanting boy who rushed up to meet you, his overcoat unbuttoned, the pockets of it stuffed with railway waybills and handbills all scribbled over in the intervals of work in the railway offices, and began to read you his latest masterpiece – the great play in which the thud of hoofs continued from first curtain to last – till he suddenly discovered he had the wrong waybills and was really reading from his great epic on St Brendan the Navigator.
I suspected that night that he looked on Colum as his son, and he developed something of the same possessiveness towards me. One night I said something that pleased him and he replied, ‘I should have had a son like you, Michael. Don’t you think I’d have made a good father for a poet?’
I said something about Diarmuid’s being a good substitute, but he laughed it off.
‘Oh, Diarmuid has the makings of a very good businessman. Did I tell you I discovered he’d been emptying my wastepaper basket and selling drafts of my poems to an American collector?’
One night a year or two later he called and discovered I had been in bed for a week with bronchitis.
‘You should have sent me a wire, you know,’ he said with tears in his eyes. ‘I’d have come and looked after you. I’m quite a good plain cook, you know. I can cook chops very well.’
Every week he came to my lodgings or flat, on the same evening and at the same hour. Every time he said the same thing, ‘My dear fellow, I hope I’m not interrupting you’, tossed his coat and hat impatiently on the sofa (once when I took them out to the hall he looked at me slyly and asked, ‘Was that necessary?’), combed out his hair and beard, and settled himself in my favourite chair. He was a creature of habit, the sort of man who all his life will sit at the same table of the same restaurant to eat the same meal, and be ill at ease when waited on by a waitress he is not acquainted with.
First, he wanted to know how the writing was going. Usually it was going badly. In those days I wrote in brief excited fits that might be followed by months of idleness and depression, or – what was worse – of fruitless and exhausting labour on some subject I was not mature enough to tackle. A book on Irish literature, which Yeats and he had urged me to write, was not written until thirtyfive years later. Sometimes he lectured me on the Dark Fortnight and the Bright Fortnight, one of those generalizations like Leonardo and the Economy of Nature that wore me out. At other times he was really intelligent.
‘You know, my dear fellow, a man cannot be so dissatisfied with his own work unless he has much better work to come.’
Once I must really have exasperated him, for he said: ‘You know, you remind me of an old hen who has just laid an egg and is goi
ng round complaining. Did you ever hear a hen that has laid an egg? She says, “Oh, God! God! God! God! There are going to be no more eggs!” That’s what she says, you know.’
He took a cup of tea, clutching the cup and saucer close to his beard, refused a second cup, always in the same dim, hasty way – ‘No, thank you, my dear fellow’ – while looking at you unseeingly over his spectacles. Precisely at twenty minutes to eleven he glanced at his watch and gasped, ‘I must be going’, leaped up as though on wires and fumbled his way downstairs for the last tram. He always stood right in the tracks, signalling frantically with both arms to the driver, and then, without a backward glance, bundled himself on and was halfway up the stairs before the tram re-started. There were no regrets, no backward glances or waves of the hand. His mind was already on something else, like Father’s when he was leaving for Cork.
Any break in the habitual round, as when I went home to Cork for the Christmas holidays, irritated him and caused a minor convulsion in his life, and he hit back by complaining that I was ‘imperilling my immortal soul by guzzling and swilling’! He was left with a whole evening on his hands that he did not know what to do with, and if he chose to go to someone else’s house on that particular evening, there was a reasonable chance that he would continue the practice for the rest of his life, unless they, too, with the incurable instability of human beings, decided to take a holiday or get sick.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 31