An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  By this I do not mean that Russell was his inferior, if such judgements have any meaning. He was one of those people, like Desmond McCarthy, whom I later became friendly with, who love writers and books for their own sweet sake, have no apparent jealousy and who, though first-rate men themselves, will appear hardly at all in literary history.

  A week or so after the quarrel I have described, Russell resigned from the secretaryship of the Academy, giving as his reason that he ‘would have nothing to do with us or with a country so given over to the devil’, as Yeats quoted him in a letter to me. The quotation is probably correct because, as I shall have to explain, during his last year in Dublin Russell was exceedingly depressed. Yeats thought he was just afraid of a row.

  ‘Russell is always timid before a row begins,’ he wrote to me, ‘though when it does he fights like a madman.’

  This was true enough, but I suspected that it was not Russell’s real reason, and I told Yeats he had been insufferably rude. He took this reproof from a young and unknown writer with extraordinary graciousness. ‘I must smooth him down,’ he said mildly, washing his hands with an episcopal air.

  He had been reading a novel by Austin Clarke, one of the young writers Russell felt he had discovered, and reading it with genuine admiration, but instead of writing to Clarke as he would normally have done, he wrote to Russell, congratulating him on being the first to appreciate Clarke’s gifts. ‘As usual, you were right and I was wrong,’ he wrote.

  Russell, who was always pathetically grateful for any little tribute from Yeats, rushed round to my house to show me the letter. ‘I think that’s very noble of him, don’t you?’ he asked ingenuously and, pleased to see him happy, I agreed. Of course he wrote at once to Yeats, withdrawing his resignation, and things went on as before. I could not resist making fun of Yeats about it, and told him I was writing a book of stories in which all my acquaintances would appear in the historic circumstances that suited them best, and that he was being described as a Renaissance cardinal. He chuckled, because he loved to be thought a really smooth intriguer, which he wasn’t. ‘Ah, we know one another so long,’ he said modestly.

  The Irish Government had just banned Shaw’s Black Girl in Search of God as being ‘in its general tendency indecent and obscene’. It was a crude effort of the Censorship Board to prevent the teaching of Rationalism, and the one small peg they had to hang the charge of obscenity on was the woodcuts of a naked girl. There was no clause in the Act which permitted the Minister to ban any pictures, even if they were obscene, and I wanted to use the book to fight the Censorship Board. I argued that if Shaw, Yeats and lesser writers like myself took the Abbey Theatre for one Sunday in the month, lectured and sold copies of the book, we could force the Government to withdraw the ban because even Mr de Valera’s government would hardly be idiotic enough to prosecute Shaw and Yeats, but Yeats felt he was too old and ill to face a public campaign, so we compromised on a deputation to the Minister of Justice, Patrick Rutledge.

  It seemed to me important that we should not offer Rutledge the excuse of having banned the book on account of the pictures, because only if we could get him to state this himself could we show that the order was illegal. Accordingly the deputation – Yeats, Russell, Higgins and I – agreed that we should confine ourselves to the text and make no mention of the pictures unless the Minister mentioned them himself.

  But next morning when I arrived at Government Buildings, there was Yeats with a suspicious-looking folio under his arm. ‘What is that?’ I asked, and, with the air of a small boy caught at the jam, he said angrily. ‘These are reproductions of the frescoes by Michelangelo in the Pope’s private chapel.’ I said that we might as well go home, but it was no use. Yeats had made up a beautiful speech on the Sanctity of the Nude and he intended to deliver to to somebody.

  He did, and Russell added a few useful observations about Victorians who put trousers on table-legs, while I fumed and Higgins chuckled. As an old trade-union official he knew as I did exactly how much the Sanctity of the Nude troubled the sleep of an Irish politician. That night in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre the Minister grabbed Higgins by the arm and said, ‘Yeats thinks I’m going to use what he said about the dirty pictures in the Pope’s chapel. What a fool I am!’

  All the same, Yeats refused to quarrel with me. He published two books of my translations from the Irish and rewrote them in the process. Gogarty once invited me to come to Yeats’ flat with him – ‘He’s writing a few little lyrics for me, and I’d like to see how he’s getting on.’ It was rather like that. I went one night to Yeats’ for dinner and we fought for God knows how long over a single line of an O’Rahilly translation I had done – ‘Has made me travel to seek you, Valentine Brown.’ At first I was fascinated by the way he kept trying it out, changing pitch and intonation. ‘Has made me – no! Has made me travel to seek you – No, that’s wrong, HAS MADE ME TRAVEL TO SEEK YOU, VALENTINE BROWN – no!’

  Long before that evening I had tired of the line, and hearing it repeated endlessly in Yeats’ monotone I felt it sounded worse.

  ‘It’s tautological,’ I complained. ‘It should be something like “Has made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown”,’ and he glared at me as if he had never seen me before.

  ‘No beggars! No beggars!’ he roared, and I realized that, like other theatre men I have known, he thought the writer’s place was at home.

  All the same, it was as interesting to work over poetry with him as it was later to work over plays. He was an absolute master of both, and his principal virtue was his principal defect. He had absolutely no ear for music that I could discern, though this, of course, never shook his faith in his own musical genius. He told a story of how he had gone to Dr Sigerson’s one day when Sigerson had an old countrywoman in a hypnotic trance and made her feel Yeats’ face. ‘Poet,’ she had said, then ‘great poet’, then ‘musician’. ‘And then I knew she was a genuine medium,’ Yeats declared.

  He was pleased when someone said he had a ‘natural’ ear, and, for all I know, this may have been true: he certainly had not a cultivated one. When I returned from a holiday in Italy and told him of the folk-singing I had heard on the canals in Venice, he asked me modestly if it was anything like his own. Nevertheless, it saved him from the sort of jingle that poets with too sensitive a musical ear fall into, and the harder he worked at writing words for music, the more unmusical they became. Even when he revised the O’Rahilly translations I had done, which were in alexandrines, he treated them as though they were in iambic pentameter, unaware that he had dropped a beat.

  His musical adviser was F. R. Higgins, another old friend of Russell, and up to a short time before Yeats’ death his most intimate friend in Ireland. For years the one fathead wrote what he thought were songs, the other fathead fitted them, as he believed, to old Irish airs, and they got a third fathead to take down their nonsense in staff notation. If Russell and Bergin were a queer pair, Yeats and Higgins were queerer still. Higgins was huge, fat and handsome, with a red face and black lank hair that tumbled in a lovelock over one eye and tiny feet that would not support his Falstaffian frame. He was emotional, indiscreet and generous, and, after talking to him for an evening, you were left with the impression that you had made a friend for life. But he left you, and within ten minutes was giving himself with equal generosity to your worst enemy and, before even he knew what he was doing, was betraying you all over the shop.

  I once said of him that he was a Protestant with all the vices of a Catholic, but because he was a Protestant, and had set up a little trade journal of his own and lived off the small proceeds, and had bought himself a little bungalow on the Dodder, and was a kind and considerate husband, he kept building up in himself an enormous feeling of guilt, so that when you next met him he was merely wondering how much you had heard of his witty description of you and what plots you had thought up to get your own back on him, till at last you felt he was no friend at all, much less a friend for life.


  Once, after a meeting of Yeats’ moribund Academy, when O’Faolain and myself had been trying to get Ernie O’Malley elected, we had a drink with Higgins and then went out to Yeats’ house. Yeats greeted us with his Renaissance cardinal’s chuckle and asked: ‘What do you two young rascals mean by trying to fill my Academy with gunmen?’

  We realized at once that Higgins had been on the telephone to report everything we had said in the most disparaging way, and I said in exasperation, ‘Trust you to make a friend of a man who is uneducated, intellectually and emotionally!’ Yeats gave a great guffaw, but, as always happened when he felt he had been rebuked, he must have brooded on it, because he replied to it a year or so later.

  ‘You don’t understand my friendship with Higgins, O’Connor, but when you reach my age you will find there is one thing a man cannot do without, and that is another man to talk to him about women.’ To someone else he said, ‘X comes here and talks to me about women, and it is all invention. Higgins comes sweating from his whore and every word rings true.’ But there was much more to his friendship with Higgins than that. It was characteristic of Yeats to deprecate the genuine warmth of his own attachments. He needed Gogarty and Higgins as he needed the women he talked to them about, because they broke through the barriers he could not help erecting about himself.

  Higgins never knew when he had been rebuked. Yeats felt he had been rebuked even when – as on that occasion – no rebuke had been intended.

  But God help Yeats if he really listened to Higgins’ romances! At regular intervals he fell in love as we all do, always madly and for the first and last time, and Dublin resounded with his confidences distributed generously like everything else he had and always under a vow of secrecy; and when his unhappy passion reached its inevitable tragic conclusion he fell ill, always with cancer or something equally incurable. He knew that no ordinary doctor would be heartless enough to break the news to him, but he knew how to beat that too. He applied for a life insurance policy, had himself examined by the insurance company’s doctor, and when the policy was accepted tore up the papers and rushed into town to drink with his cronies.

  Unfortunately, it was to Higgins that Yeats found it easy to confide all his little domestic difficulties. It was typical of Yeats’ capacity to size a man up that with me, on the contrary, his references to sex were usually almost boyishly modest and even made me impatient. He knew, too, though I never told him so, that I did not share his interest in spiritualism. One night I asked him bluntly if he ever had had an experience that could not be explained in strictly rational terms. He thought for a while and grew embarrassed.

  ‘Yes, once. I think I can tell you. You are, after all, a man of the world. I was having a love affair with a certain woman and she said she was pregnant. I was very worried because I felt that if she was, I must marry her. I came home to Ireland and confessed to an old aunt. “Don’t believe her,” she said. “She’s having you on.” So I went to a certain famous medium and asked for her help without telling her what my trouble was. She went into a trance and produced some writing that neither of us could read. Finally I took it to the British Museum and they told me to come back in a week. When I went back the head of one of the departments said, “Mr Yeats, this is a most remarkable document. It is written in the form of Hebrew taught in the German universities in the seventeenth century.”‘

  Then Yeats looked at me triumphantly, his head tossed back, the big, blind eyes behind the spectacles challenging me to explain that one if I could.

  ‘Never mind what sort of Hebrew it was written in,’ I said. ‘Did it tell you whether you were the father of the child or not?’

  The practical Corkman! He sat back wearily – rationalists are so hard to argue with.

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ he said vaguely. ‘It just said things like “O great poet of our race!” ’ Clearly he thought this important, but I didn’t. As a storyteller I felt that the point had got lost.

  ‘Well, there wasn’t any necessity for saying that in Hebrew,’ I said, and this too, like the business of Higgins, rankled because I got the usual well-thought-out retort a couple of years later.

  What Yeats did not know was that his harmless little crushes on younger women and every small disagreement in the home would be repeated by Higgins within an hour in an exaggerated and witty way in some Dublin public-house. This embarrassed me, not because I am not indiscreet myself and don’t enjoy gossip like the next man, but because Higgins’ gossip had an element of intrigue in it. It was almost as though by telling you funny stories about your friends he was ingratiating himself with you and lining you up against them. Gogarty’s gossip, which was much more slanderous and a breach of professional confidence besides, since Yeats was his patient, was so disinterested that it seemed to get lost in its own malice, and you could laugh at it without feeling that you were betraying anybody or anything. To stop him in a story would be like stealing a bottle from a baby, but it was almost like doing a kindness to Higgins.

  Once when he was telling some story about the Yeatses that embarrassed me, I got up in a hurry and said, ‘And yet I never leave that house without feeling like a million dollars’ – a queer phrase for me to use, and one that shows how uncomfortable I felt. But the effect on Higgins was even stranger. There were tears in his eyes – tears of real affection – and he replied, ‘And I feel exactly the same.’

  Of course he did, but he simply could not resist a good story when it aligned you against someone who was involved in his intrigue – innocent intrigues enough, God knows, because he was fantastically generous. There was the occasion, for instance, when Yeats was reported to be dying in Majorca. I can still remember the lights flashing it out over O’Connell Bridge and feeling sick at heart. Robinson and Higgins, in a state of maudlin emotion, arranged for the lying in state in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre with a wreath of laurel over Yeats’ head – ‘not plain laurel, Fred,’ Robinson sobbed, ‘but the small-leafed poet’s laurel.’ When Yeats recovered and came home, this was much too good a story for Higgins to keep from him – since it showed Robinson in a ridiculous light. It never once crossed Higgins’ mind that an old and sickly man might not appreciate the comedy of his own death.

  ‘You needn’t go on,’ growled Yeats. ‘It reminds me of my two uncles, one of whom was drunk and the other mad, quarrelling over my grandfather’s open grave as to which of them was to inherit Grandfather’s musical box.’

  Yeats’ comment was so much better than the original story that Higgins had to come and tell me about it, and I don’t think that even then it occurred to him that it contained a rebuke. Which, of course, was also what was nice about Higgins, even when he did not know that he was being nice.

  In his last phase, when I knew him, Yeats was by way of being a Fascist, and a supporter of O’Duffy. He wrote unsingable Fascist songs to the tunes of ‘O’Donnell Abu’ and ‘The Heather Glen’ and caused me acute embarrassment by appearing at dinner in the Kildare Street Club in a blue shirt. At the same time there never was anyone with less of the fanatic in him. He took a mischievous delight in devilling anyone who took politics too seriously. One evening in the club he insisted on introducing me to an old Unionist, and then, when I’d left, made the old man’s life a misery by telling him that I was a notorious gunman and a supporter of de Valera. He told of a London party where a duke had come up to him and said, ‘I suppose you support Dr Cosgrave?’ ‘Oh, I support the gunmen – on both sides,’ said Yeats. ‘And what did he say?’ I asked. ‘Oh, the damn fool turned his back on me and walked away,’ Yeats said in disgust.

  I had to threaten to resign before I got him to drop the proposal to produce Coriolanus in coloured shirts at the Abbey, and even after that he deliberately provoked me by coming out to dinner with me again in a brilliant blue shirt. Mrs Yeats, who was English, was a strong supporter of de Valera and hated all Fascists, including her next-door neighbours, who were Blueshirts also. Now Mrs Yeats kept hens and the Blueshirts kept a dog, and the dog
worried Mrs Yeats’ hens. One day Mrs Yeats’ favourite hen disappeared, and she, according to W.B., said, ‘It’s that damn Blueshirts’ dog’, so she wrote a very stiff letter to the neighbours accusing the dog of having made away with her hen. ‘But you see, O’Connor, the neighbours are Blueshirts, with a proper sense of order and discipline, and within an hour or two back comes the reply, “Dear Madam, Dog Destroyed.” Now George is English, and like all English people she has a great tenderness towards animals, and I felt her almost in tears for the death of the Blueshirt dog.’

  The second part of the story came a few nights later when Yeats said to me, ‘O’Connor, you remember the story I told you about the Blueshirt dog and the democratic hen? The democratic hen has come back. George is overwhelmed with guilt. She wants to write an apology to the neighbours, but I say to her, “It is too late for apologies. No apology is going to bring the Blueshirt dog back to life.”‘

  Both the Yeatses are in that little story; the sincere and sometimes cranky public man, and the tolerant and affectionate husband and friend who, like the plain girl at the party, does not miss a single move.

  13

  By 1932 I had begun to notice that Russell was becoming more and more emotional. This was the year of his wife’s death, and he could not manage the unnecessarily large house with just the aid of an old housekeeper.