For months after I got back I would not see him at all. It was not that he was punishing me for my infidelity, but that he had got himself entangled in some new routine and, since he was completely unaware of it himself, could not get free of it. Then one night I would hear the peremptory, irritable rat-tat-tat that I could tell from hundreds of others, and there he would be tranquilly waiting at the door, stroking his beard, and as he strode impatiently in, without waiting for an invitation, he would say with a sort of happy sigh, ‘My dear fellow, I hope I’m not interrupting you.’ Another cycle was under way.
He liked fixed days for doing fixed things, and fixed ways of doing them. At one period of his life he painted every Sunday, and the Dublin story was that when he counted his pictures at the end of one year he said in great distress, ‘There’s something wrong. There are only fifty-one.’
One Monday evening, when the pattern was running smoothly in Mondays, he came in and said without even waiting for an opening: ‘I was in Howth yesterday afternoon. I hadn’t been there for twelve years. It’s very beautiful, you know.’
The face and tone were stoical, but I had the feeling that he was desperately unhappy. I could not imagine why. I have a very slow mind, and it was not until half an hour later that I recognized what it was about the phrase that sounded wrong.
‘But isn’t Sunday your day for going to Seumas O’Sullivan’s, A.E.?’
‘Seumas was very rude to Stephens at the Academy dinner on Thursday night,’ he said gravely. ‘You weren’t there. He called Stephens a poetaster. I didn’t think that was very nice. I don’t think I could ever be friends with Seumas again.’
I was deeply touched by his grief at the loss of an old friend and even more by his loyalty to James Stephens, whom he loved in the almost immoderate way he loved Colum, but I was completely shaken by his next phrase. He gave me a piercing look and asked, ‘Michael, has it ever occurred to you that Seumas tipples?’
Literally, there was nothing anyone could reply to that because O’Sullivan’s drinking was on the High Court scale. I did not quote Yeats’ remark that ‘The only trouble about Seumas O’Sullivan is that when he is not drunk he is sober’. I merely felt as I had when Russell had explained that I met girls who told bawdy stories because Nature intended me for a realistic novelist. I could hardly believe that any human being could be so utterly unobservant.
But all ended happily, for the following Monday evening he arrived at my flat at the usual time and – well on in the conversation – remarked casually, ‘I was at Seumas’ yesterday’, and I knew that habit as well as old affection had triumphed again.
Russell’s old friends loved the creature of habit, the well-tried phrases on the regular evening visit: his enemies detested them. What fascinated me then, and fascinates me still, is the wild creature behind them – the Portadown Presbyterian with his ingenuousness, his loneliness, his unforgettable flashes of genius. And it was hard work to get at it: talk, pictures, poems, everything he did was generalized into insignificance.
Once he asked me to select one of his pictures for my flat, and I chose a painting of a tree by a lake – chose it because it was the only picture in the room that did not contain those dreadful children who appeared in almost every picture he painted and whom he had seen originally in some landscape of Corot’s.
‘By the way,’ I asked, ‘what is that tree?’ I did not mean to be impertinent, but at once I knew I had been.
‘Oh, no particular tree,’ he replied with a hurt expression. ‘Just a tree!’
Everything with him was ‘just a tree’, not an oak or an elm or an ash; above all, not one with a character or pattern of its own. Habit had obliterated all distinctions.
Even his poems, as often as he repeated them – and he repeated them endlessly – never changed a word or an intonation. He said he knew by heart every line he had written, and this I found hard to understand, because he was the first person to point out to me that language is finite and that its beauty wears away by repetition. But even Yeats’ early poems, for all the work Yeats had put in on improving them, never altered by a word or a tone on Russell’s lips. He remembered them as they had been written, and though he knew perfectly well when Yeats had improved them, he hated the alterations. If he is the ‘old school friend’ whom Yeats accused of liking the early poems merely ‘because they reminded him of his own youth’, that is altogether too simple-minded. Russell was a fine critic, and he knew an improvement the moment he saw it, but the habit-forming complex, like a hardening of the arteries, never allowed him to see Yeats’ early work as he saw mine and Higgins’ and Kavanagh’s, and, though Russell was kind to the point of fatuity, you simply could not take him in. However bad a poet he may have been, he was a poet, and he simply knew.
11
Russell, who was full of Hegelianism, used to argue that Irish literature developed in pairs. There were himself and Yeats, then Stephens and Colum, then Austin Clarke and F. R. Higgins, and now Geoffrey Phibbs and I.
But Russell was an example of another sort of Hegelianism, which he did not observe at all. The rediscovery of Old Irish, on which the whole literary movement was based, had been made by German scholars. When the discovery spread to Ireland the remarkable group of philologists, Irish and German, who worked here was probably the best group of scholars the country had known in modern times, and isolated by their very eminence. When Irish writers such as Yeats and Synge began to make use of the material they unearthed, and wrote as nobody in Ireland had written since the ninth century, they in their turn were isolated, and the two groups were drawn together and existed in an extraordinary love-hate relationship. There were the highly improbable friendships of George Moore and Kuno Meyer, of George Moore and Richard Best, of John Synge and Best. ‘Moore didn’t know the English language at all,’ Best said. ‘Moore pointed to a passage in a book and said, “Best, this man is very ignorant. He writes, ‘It were better to say’.” I said, “Moore, that is not bad English. That is merely the subjunctive mood.” “Best,” he said, “what is the subjunctive mood?” I explained it to him, and he said, “But, Best, how wonderful! I shall never again use anything but the subjunctive mood.”‘
Best also explained that Synge didn’t know English, but I have forgotten what it was that Synge didn’t know. All I do remember is that Synge did not know how to make tea. ‘So I said to him, “Synge,” I said, “I will buy you a teapot,” and Synge asked, “Best, what is a teapot?”’ It would be fascinating to know what other strange discoveries great scholars and writers made about one another.
The truth is that they were friends without knowing why and without understanding the fierce resentments that sometimes blew up between them. They were the nearest thing in nature to the two sexes, for ever scouting about one another’s encampments and bringing back horrible tales of what went on in them. Best had the last word on ‘that fellow, Joyce’, whom everyone talked about. ‘He borrowed money from everyone in Dublin, but he never got a penny out of me.’
So it was quite natural that Russell should come to my flat with Osborn Bergin, the greatest of Irish scholars; that we should all meet on Sunday evenings at Russell’s and that Russell and I should drop in on Bergin. The only difference was that Russell and I both made tea, but Bergin provided no refreshments. Either he was too much of an ascetic or he was too afraid of his housekeeper.
On the river under the windows of my library at Ballsbridge I used to watch the romance of a swan who had lost his mate and had struck up an immoral relationship with a fussy little duck who was obviously thrilled to death by such a large, strange, beautiful husband. Whenever I watched that strange pair I used to think of Russell and Bergin.
Bergin was a prince of scholars, and the figure I think of whenever I re-read A Grammarian’s Funeral – who ‘gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, Dead from the waist down’ – though Bergin wouldn’t give you anything, not even a doctrine. ‘Bergin’s Law’, known to all serious philologists, was id
entified and named by his pupil D. A. Binchy, but Bergin himself never really believed in it. He was a small man with a neat brown beard and a face that varied between the stern and precise and the vague and vacuous. He usually wore a costume that had been fashionable among Irish nationalists at the time I was born – a tweed jacket, pantaloons and long cycling stockings – and he usually sat with his legs crossed and one eye half closed, making patterns in the air with his pipe. I used to follow the patterns with my eyes, feeling sure that his subconscious mind was writing messages of great significance in the air, if only I could interpret what they meant. Where Russell burbled, Bergin rasped. When he had a story to tell you he would pull his legs in under his chair, point at you with his pipe, and screw his face up. When we were alone in his house he would put down his pipe, pick up his old fiddle and play and sing Gaudeamus Igitur and other songs from his student days in Germany. His fiddling was worse than his voice, which was terrible.
On one subject he knew more than anybody in the world, and he could not bear to discuss it with more than perhaps five people – rather in the manner of the Lowells and Cabots, and if the God’s truth was known he probably thought the Cabots very unreliable. Robin Flower, a really fine scholar, he could not tolerate because Flower spoke Irish with an English accent – forgivable enough in an Englishman, one would have thought.
Nothing would persuade Russell, who knew no language but English, but that I was a formidable scholar too, since I had once, to his own knowledge, caught T. F. O’Rahilly out. O’Rahilly, second only to Bergin in scholarship, though not in crankiness, had a great grudge against Edmund Curtis, the historian, who reviewed books in Irish for Russell’s paper, the Irish Statesman, and he wrote abusive letters to Russell, suggesting that Curtis couldn’t read a page of Irish without a dictionary, till poor Curtis gave up. Russell conscripted me in his place, and in the first review I wrote I came a cropper that wouldn’t even have occurred to Curtis, and O’Rahilly wrote his usual letter of complaint, but with what for him was urbanity. He probably felt that if you must have devils you had better have them of your own making. By a coincidence, the very same week that O’Rahilly’s letter appeared I got one of his two beautiful anthologies of love poetry for review, and there was a mistake that even a child wouldn’t have made. I struggled hard with my conscience, because the book was so beautiful I merely wanted to enthuse and not bother with what to me was nonsense, so I finally ignored it. But I couldn’t resist writing to Russell to prove how noble I was, and Russell, walking forth (it was one of his favourite examples of the Economy of Nature that he was always talking about), met Bergin, who read my letter with the air of a Lowell being told of a Cabot solecism by a Boston Biddy. ‘Nature’ must have been working overtime that day because the first person Bergin ran into was O’Rahilly and, in the true Lowell spirit, he showed O’Rahilly the note he had taken. That night, coming on to midnight, O’Rahilly was pounding on Bergin’s door, almost in tears, with the cry of ‘But I had it right in proof, Bergin! I had it right in proof!’ Bergin went round next evening to tell Russell, and Russell wrote to me next morning.
Ah, me! But after that O’Rahilly sent me his works, and was. delighted when Thurneysen and I in acknowledging one of them used exactly the same words, Thurneysen in German and I in English. Is it any wonder I enjoyed scouting round the scholars’ encampments for what I could bring home in the way of gossip?
But Bergin could not trust a man capable of making a mistake like that. One night, he and I were walking home from Russell’s, and I told him I was uncertain of the meaning of one verse in O’Rahilly’s second anthology of love poetry. I got a very short answer: ‘Couldn’t say without seeing the text.’ But I was getting used to Bergin’s ‘Don’t knows’ and ‘Can’t imagines’ and I produced the book. Bergin took it with great politeness and loathing and stopped under the nearest gas-lamp to read. Having read the verse I didn’t understand, he turned the page to the beginning of the poem and read it right through. Then he turned back the page and did it again. Finally he closed the book and handed it back to me. ‘I’m always telling O’Rahilly not to publish manuscripts he doesn’t understand,’ he said in a dead voice, and after that he said no more.
He had such a horror of inaccuracy that he avoided the risk of it by never speaking anything but English, except when he was reminiscing, and had it all, as you might say, pat. Once in explaining to me his dislike of the Germans, he described an incident of his student days when he and a French student named Etienne went to register as aliens. ‘Osborn Bergin’ sounded a good Teutonic name, so he had no trouble, but when it came to the French boy’s turn the policeman said flatly, ‘Etienne, das ist kein Name.’ According to Bergin, this had given him a hatred of Germans that had lasted throughout his life. When I protested, he said gloomily, ‘There are only two tones in the German voice, the whine and the bellow. They’re whining now; the bellow will come later.’ (This was before Hitler.) I, having no culture at all except what I had picked up from German, protested again, but he crushed me brutally. ‘Binchy’ (then our ambassador in Germany) ‘says the Germans are a people you keep on trying to like.’ That settled that, too. God alone knows what Binchy did say, but this is what Bergin felt he should have said, and it was said on his behalf.
When Bergin and Best went to Germany in later years, Bergin refused to speak German at all, and he let the unfortunate Best struggle with the problem of transport and currency without once opening his mouth. But when Best in Cologne station, having asked Bergin for some small change and got nothing but a scowl, told the railway porter, ‘Ich habe nicht Geld’, outraged majesty recovered sufficiently to rasp ‘Ich habe KEIN Geld!’ Everybody in Ireland knew the story of how, when he stood over the grave of his old friend Father Peter O’Leary, he glanced at the breastplate of the coffin and muttered ‘Four mistakes!’ but I suspect I was the only person ignorant or innocent enough to challenge him with it. When I did, he merely cocked one eye, made figures on the air with his pipe and muttered. ‘Well, I didn’t make the mistakes, did I?’
He was rather friendlier to the French than to the Germans, and I suspect that if only he could have spoken their language in a way that satisfied his own standards he would have enthused about them. He used to tell with glee a story of Meyer’s, who had been with some other scholars at the house of a French philologist and discussed the disappearance of final consonants in the language. The host’s old father listened with horror to those blasphemies about his native language, because he knew that final consonants had not disappeared, and at last he whispered in anguish to Meyer, ‘Ne le’ croye’ pa’, m’sieu! I’ ne sav’ pa’ ce qu’i’ di’.’
And yet, because I loved him, I knew Bergin was a fiercely emotional and possessive man, consumed with obscure abstract hatreds. I know now what I did not realize at the time – what it was that Russell and he had in common. Both were European figures who in their hearts had never ceased to be anything but small-town boys. When Russell was moved he reverted to the Lurgan Orangeman, and when Bergin was moved he reverted to the Cork Gaelic Leaguer. It was an experience to lunch with him and Tadhg O’Donoghue of University College, Cork, who didn’t seem to me to have an idea in his good-looking head, though Bergin put on more of a performance for him than he did even for Russell. Bergin had once been Secretary of the Leeside Branch of the Gaelic League in Cork, which had had a disagreement with the Governing Body in Dublin, and when Bergin talked of his disagreement, then forty years old, he became almost incoherent with anger. I never discovered what the Governing Body was supposed to have done, though I listened to the story several times.
Another of his hatreds was George Moore, who, in his usual petulant way, had said to him one night at Best’s, ‘Oh, Bergin, you bore me!’ to which Bergin had retorted, ‘I am as much entitled to bore you, Mr Moore, as you are to bore me.’ When a man repeats years later the crushing retort he has made, you can be sure that he was badly hurt, and judging by the way Bergin repeated it he m
ust have wanted a writer of his own as badly as Moore wanted a scholar, and felt about Moore’s behaviour as a man feels when told by a girl he had been in love with that he was no good as a lover.
His third detestation was Yeats, who, according to Bergin, had insulted him during a meeting of the Dublin Literary Society. ‘Dr Bergin, are there any astrological manuscripts in Irish?’ Yeats had asked, and Bergin had replied, ‘Not to my knowledge, Mr Yeats.’ Yeats had then deliberately turned away in his chair. It was no good telling Bergin that Yeats had probably turned away to meditate on the question of whether the British Government or the Catholic Church had destroyed the manuscripts. Bergin knew it was an insult intended for him.
But his greatest rancour was reserved for his old friend Joseph O’Neill, a good Celtic scholar, who had been a fellow student of his in Germany. O’Neill – one at least of whose donnish romances will be remembered – married a literary woman, who – again according to Bergin – was always talking of ‘Peguy and Proust’ and getting the pronunciation wrong – a major offence in anyone but an intimate friend. (When I quoted in German or French Bergin contented himself with following me soundlessly on his lips.)
The O’Neills dropped Bergin, ‘a man who couldn’t dance either literally or metaphorically’, and he resented it fiercely, all the more because Russell replaced him as the O’Neills’ best friend, and over the years he made O’Neill the butt of scholarly jokes and poems. The verse squibs began with their student days in Germany and O’Neill’s passion for stories of the Wild West:
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