An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  Buffalo Bill war ein Mann, he read,

  In des Wortes bester Bedeutung, oh!

  They described O’Neill’s days as a school inspector – ‘Holy nuns would give him tea, priests would give him dinner’ – and described him at his first public function:

  When Gaily was young he had more sense

  Than to follow the fiddler and waste his pence.

  Dancing reels on a Galway strand;

  He was saving his feet for a Free State band.

  Heyho, Gallio dancing,

  Slithering, sliding, prancing!

  Heyho, Gallio dancing,

  Dancing at a Free State ball.

  And when Russell (who lived round the corner from both O’Neill and Bergin) reached San Francisco, there was a savage little note waiting for him that read: ‘Please remember me to Joseph O’Neill.’

  Russell and Bergin were both lonely men, and there was nothing to indicate that one was a widower and the other a bachelor but the fact that the bachelor’s house didn’t look as though it needed cleaning. Each week they went together to the local cinema and they carted detective stories to one another’s houses. In his days as editor Russell could glut himself on whodunits, but now he was often hard up for something to read, and as a librarian I was able to help. Lit up by the discussion of some new gimmick in Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, Russell would expand on the great detective story he would write, called ‘The Murder of a Celtic Scholar’, with Bergin as principal suspect, though the victim might be Agnes O’Farrelly, Douglas Hyde or even Eoin MacNeill, a fine historian, but ‘quite unscrupulous with his sources’, according to Bergin. Those were delightful evenings, though when they came to me it took a full week to get rid of the stink of their tobacco. Each year they got someone to drive them into the country, collected masses of coltsfoot, dried it on trays before their windows and then ground it up to mix with their tobacco.

  They were always making mystifying little jokes at one another’s expense. If it wasn’t ‘The Murder of a Celtic Scholar’, it was Bergin’s ‘If A.E. had written the Odyssey’, a neat little twelve-line lyric in Russell’s vaguest manner, which summed up the epic. then it was Russell writing to Bergin as he crossed the Mississippi, ‘which at this point is a mile wide’, and Bergin’s reply, ‘Aristotle says an animal a mile long could not be beautiful, but please don’t quote me because I haven’t the text before me.’ This was reported back to me by Russell with the comment, ‘Isn’t that just like dear Osborn?’

  But in spite of all the joking Russell was very perturbed by the rumour that dear Osborn had written love poetry in Irish which, some friends had told him, was very passionate indeed. I tried to reassure him, but he wasn’t satisfied. Russell had wanted a scholar for a friend, and if it now turned out that Bergin was really a wild romantic poet whose word no man could rely on it would be worse than not knowing what to do with his Sunday afternoons. One night he came to my flat, bristling.

  ‘I was at Curran’s last night,’ he began, without preliminaries, as he did only when he was upset. ‘He says Bergin has a poem in all the anthologies which is very passionate. Have you got it? Could you translate it for me? I want to know what it’s like.’ Of course, I knew it by heart. It was part of the anthology of bad verse I had memorized in the days when I couldn’t afford books. It was the plague of Bergin’s life, because nobody reprinted it correctly, and it had almost begun to seem that nobody could, as though it had a jinx on it. Bergin had had a circular drawn up, embodying the correct text and demanding a proof.

  I translated out of my head for Russell, and after the first few lines he began to stroke his beard and beam like a lover being reassured of his girl’s fidelity. ‘All literary convention!’ he murmured joyously. ‘I knew it! I knew our Osborn had never been in love!’ (In which, of course, he was wrong, because our Osborn had been very much in love with one of his students; an American girl he had pursued, even abroad; but we cut our friends to suit our needs, and Russell needed a scholar rather than another poet.) So the two elderly men went on happily adoring one another.

  Yeats was madly jealous of Russell’s scholar and would have given anything to possess one of his own. Nothing would have pleased him better than to be able to say, ‘My friend Bergin, the greatest living philologist, tells me…’ But, anyway, Bergin wouldn’t have told him the time of day. Except among the Lowells and Cabots he never talked of his own subject except to say, ‘Don’t know’, ‘Can’t tell’, or ‘Too obscure for me’. He knew I was crazy to learn Old Irish, but the only contribution he ever made to my knowledge of it was when he took Strachan and O’Keeffe’s edition of The Cattle Raid of Cooley from a shelf one night and murmured, ‘Em. Very clean!’

  He wasn’t at all the dry stick one must make him appear if one is to get the real biscuity Bergin flavour. As with Russell, there was under the urbanized exterior the emotional volcano of the provincial town. Mother adored him, and used to sit at the window, watching for his arrival, so that she could be the first to welcome him. He told her stories of Cork and liked listening to her stories of it. Yeats, of course, either hadn’t heard of Cork or didn’t think much of it. One night when Bergin was in the flat with us a knock came at the door and she went to answer. A moment later she appeared in the room, looking like a ghost and with her hands in the air. ‘Michael!’ she cried. ‘Yeats!’ Then she rushed off to her bedroom, where Yeats couldn’t get at her. Yeats, embarrassed by his extraordinary reception, came in looking shyer than ever, and Bergin completed his confusion. Bergin had only to see Yeats to remember that monstrous scene at the Dublin Literary Society.

  Yeats and I talked for a few minutes and the name of George Moore came up. Bergin grunted, and Yeats’ spirits began to rise, because he began to discern that however much Bergin hated him, he hated Moore worse; and many a dear friendship has begun on nothing more substantial than a common enmity. I could see he was thinking that he might yet acquire a scholar of his own, for he burst into the wonderful series of malicious anecdotes that later appeared in Dramatis Personae along with a number of scabrous ones that haven’t appeared anywhere yet.

  Bergin was exceedingly vulnerable in his sense of humour, particularly when it concerned a man who had the audacity to say that Bergin bored him. First he chuckled, then he laughed, and finally he was rolling round on the sofa, hysterical with laughter. I had never seen Yeats put on such a performance for anyone before, and I accompanied him to the tramcar in a glow of love and admiration for both of them.

  But when I returned, one look at Bergin was enough to dissipate the charm. He was sitting on the sofa, scowling, despising Yeats, despising me for permitting a man like that into the house, but most of all despising himself for the weakness of character that had made him sacrifice his dignity for the sake of a few funny stories. He was already casting himself as Browning’s ‘Lost Leader’ – ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us’.

  ‘Isn’t he a great old card?’ I said as enthusiastically as I could.

  ‘He’s a great old cod,’ Bergin snapped, without looking at me, and for the rest of the evening I couldn’t even get a civil answer out of him.

  A scholar’s work is often as much a self-portrait as a writer’s. Osborn Bergin loved Irish professional poetry of the late Middle Ages, and to those who knew him the poems give back a reflection of the man. Many of them belong to the Elizabethan period, which was the last great period of Irish love poetry, but it was characteristic of Bergin that he left all that to O’Rahilly. He edited only Cu Chonnact O Cléirigh’s Ní mé bhur n-aithne, a aos gráidh, and that only because he found it ‘mysterious’, which it is not, except for the fact that the passion becomes lost in the conceit.

  One cannot imagine his friend Kuno Meyer editing them. Meyer was the romantic scholar, and he fell upon the earlier poetry with a freshness and joyousness that can still be felt in his translations, which are all the more remarkable because they are translations from one foreign language into another. According
to Bergin, Meyer carried his translations round with him, ready to read to anyone of literary sensitiveness who could produce the perfect word for him. One cannot imagine Bergin doing that. His scholarship was superior to Meyer’s and his translations are more exact, but it is the exactness of prose rather than verse. D. A. Binchy tells the story of an English student of Bergin’s who once asked in exasperation, ‘But what is it all about?’ Bergin replied evenly, ‘I will give you an exact translation of the words.’ And that, too, is characteristic. Even in his choice of words Meyer tries to tell you ‘what it is all about’; Bergin gives you the exact prose equivalent and allows you to work out the rest for yourself.

  As a result his prose is sometimes more difficult than the verse he is translating. In that beautiful poem on the death of his wife, Muireadhach O’Daly wrote:

  Beag an cion do chúl na ngéag

  A héag ó a fior go húr óg.

  Bergin translates: ‘Little was the fault [or affection] of the branching tresses that she should die and leave her husband while fresh and young.’ But whether cion means ‘fault’ or ‘affection’ it would be more polite to translate: ‘It was no blame to the girl of the branching tresses’ or maybe even ‘It was small desire the girl of the branching tresses had to die’.

  It was not that Bergin was insensitive to what the Irish said. On the contrary, he merely believed, as he said himself, that they were as untranslatable as an ode of Horace. When I took him up on this, and translated ‘A Winter Campaign’ into the pseudo-Horatian metre of Marvell, he ignored both the compliment and the criticism, and I gathered I had committed lèse-majesté. He was touchy about any slighting remark regarding the poems themselves. Once, when I had mentioned them in the same breath with the verbose eighteenth-century poets, he replied stiffly, ‘Those men were aristocrats and scholars.’ He liked the aristocratic flavour, but even more he loved the neatness, the order, the scholarship, and the feeling of an Oxford common-room.

  That strongly donnish note existed in Irish poetry from the beginning, but in these poems it is at its strongest because the world they knew was collapsing in ruin about its authors. I think Bergin liked to remember that even in the days when earth was falling, ‘the day when earth’s foundations fled’, these Irish professional poets continued to count their syllables, and admitted no word, no grammatical form, which their masters of two hundred years before would not have approved. Like other artists, he identified himself with his subject, for he was one of the last of a great generation of scholars in a country where scholarship was no longer regarded.

  12

  What Yeats had come to see me about was his Academy of Letters, which still drags out some sort of shadowy, precarious existence. The idea of it was sound enough – a solid body of informed opinion that might encourage young writers and discourage the Catholic Church from suppressing them; but for both purposes it suffered from the fact that, apart from Yeats, its most important members lived in England and had no notion of what conditions in Ireland were like.

  The Dublin committee was Yeats, Russell, Higgins, Robinson, O’Sullivan, Gogarty and myself, ‘two of whom’, as Yeats said in his oracular way, ‘make themselves drunk and a third who came drunk from his mother’s womb’. The two who made themselves drunk were O’Sullivan and Robinson and, as he explained to me later, Yeats had to invite Robinson to tea before every committee meeting in order to supervise his drinking and make sure he reached the meeting in a sober state. The one who came drunk from his mother’s womb was Oliver Gogarty, ‘the kindest heart in Dublin and the dirtiest tongue’, as a friend of his described him. I knew the kindness. I had been only a short time in Dublin before a surgeon ordered me into hospital for an operation on my throat. A friend of mine told Gogarty, and he said, ‘Tell him to come round at once.’ I went, and Gogarty, who did not know me at all, began by apologizing for the creator of the universe in a way that endeared him to me. ‘You know you’re in the cancer group,’ he said gently, and then spent ten minutes looking at my throat. ‘Jesus Christ!’ I heard him muttering. ‘There are doctors in this town that don’t know the difference between cancer and a sore toe.’ After that, he sprang into rambunctious life. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, only Indian tea. I’ll write it out for you – you can get it at Roberts’ – Lapsang-Soo-Chong. I’m like Yeats; “I have forgotten all my Hebrew.”‘ I couldn’t help liking Gogarty, though he did make a vicious attack on me later at an Academy dinner, describing me as ‘a country boy with hair in his nose and hair in his ears and a brief-case in his hand’.

  However, Yeats was a natural organizer, never happy unless he was organizing something or somebody – a great bully, as I discovered later, and an outrageous flatterer. When I, who at the time had not even produced a book, questioned the inclusion of St John Ervine in the Academy, Yeats did not say, as he should have said, that Shaw insisted; he merely asked mellowly, ‘Why worry about literary eminence? You and I will provide that.’

  When he began to bully me I always gave him lip, almost on principle. After my father, I never quarrelled so much with anyone, and even if one allows that I am a bit in the same line myself, it takes two to make a disagreement last as long as ours. One might say that I was discovering my real father at last, and that all the old attitudes induced by my human father came on top. Yet I can truthfully say that when, towards the end of his life, I became his devoted slave, it was entirely due to his generosity, because with no one else was I so crude and uppish.

  His principal weakness was that he was easily bored, and L. A. G. Strong was not the only one who bored him. George Russell bored him too, and many others, and he made no effort to conceal it. This, I think, cost him the affection of a number of people who would have been better friends than some of those he made.

  Apart from these things, I think of him as a shy and rather lonely man who desperately wanted to be friends, and was utterly loyal to the friends he made. It took a long time to appreciate that shyness in him because it tended to make him portentous and overwhelming in society and even in the home. Once, when Michael Yeats was pulling his sister’s hair and Mrs Yeats failed to separate them, Daddy was summoned. He stalked slowly and solemnly to an armchair, sat down and recited, ‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite’, and then stalked out again, apparently feeling he had done all that was expected of a father. The children never became intimate with him: even the marvellous ‘Prayer for my Daughter’ was written while Anne was safely in another building. Michael once got his own back by asking in a piercing voice as his father went by, ‘Mummy, who is that man?’ and Yeats was deeply hurt.

  Mrs Yeats was my favourite among authors’ wives. This was an old romance, dating from my earliest days in Dublin, when again and again she had covered up my shyness and awkwardness. One evening someone had lured me to a fashionable party at Gogarty’s. I was sitting on the floor wishing I was dead when the door opened and George Yeats came in. She gave one look round the room and then came and sat beside me.

  ‘How did you know the way I was feeling?’ I asked.

  ‘You looked exactly as Willie does when he gets shy,’ she said with a grin. ‘You were running your hand through your hair.’

  I used to think no one in the world suspected my attachment, least of all George Yeats, though nowadays, I wonder if Yeats himself did not suspect it.

  The only person I ever heard him speak of with real malice was George Moore, and that still puzzles me a little, because he was a remarkably tolerant man. I have a suspicion that it was because Moore had hurt Lady Gregory by describing herself and her family as ‘soupers’. You could say anything you liked about himself, or even his family, but his toleration never really extended to people whom he thought had injured either Lady Gregory or Synge. He was generous enough in his public references to Arthur Griffith, but there is submerged ice in that line that describes ‘Arthur Griffith staring in hysterical pride’, and Padraic Colum once said to me, ‘Yeats never had any time for me after the Playboy row
.’ More than anything else that happened to him I suspect the quarrel about Synge’s great play really hurt him.

  We had our first big showdown at an early meeting of that wretched Academy when Yeats demanded that Russell, the Secretary, should change the minutes of the previous meeting. Yeats had apparently said something he should not have said and wanted it omitted. As a public official I knew that the minutes were perfectly correct, and since everybody else was afraid to oppose Yeats I said so. As a friend of Russell’s I also knew that he was terribly hurt, and when Yeats persisted in his rigmarole I flew at him.

  The minutes remained as they were, and when everybody else had gone home I stayed to comfort Russell, who was close to tears.

  ‘Yeats has always been like that,’ he said bitterly. ‘Always unscrupulous and always dishonest.’

  Naturally I believed him without wondering why on earth he had let me defend him instead of standing up for himself. It was only later, when I got to know both men better, that I noticed more and more in Russell the oscillation between love and hatred of Yeats. It worked both ways, of course. Yeats was intolerable with Russell, and one of my most shameful evenings was when I joined Yeats in baiting him; but, on the other hand, Russell was never so dull with anyone as he was with Yeats, who, when he became embarrassed, could be outrageous. Russell complained to me that when cornered in an argument, Yeats would wave his hand and say loftily, ‘Yes, Russell, but that was before the peacock screamed’ or some other bit of nonsense. This was exactly what Yeats was likely to do when he was bored, but, on the other hand, Russell did bore him. He even bored me occasionally.

  Once, when I arrived at Russell’s house in Rathgar before he was ready to receive me, I noticed the proofs of Song and its Fountains on his desk with a dedication to Yeats, ‘Rival and Friend’. (The dedication has since been printed in a different form, but I think I am right about the one I saw.) The revealing phrase was deleted from the printed book. Russell was not only too modest a man, but too good a critic not to know that there could be no rivalry between himself and Yeats, and somewhere in him there was a sense of failure that came out in his evenings with Yeats. Behind it all, I think, was Yeats’ resentment at Russell’s not having taken Synge’s side in the Playboy controversy and letting his house be used as a headquarters by the anti-Synge faction, but this was all so long before my time that I could not have been sure of identifying it. What I am sure of is that Russell needed Yeats’ pity, and Yeats had no pity. He could give you things that I think now were more worth while – admiration, tolerance and absolute loyalty, but he was as pitiless with others as he was with himself.