An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  I was unwell, and my doctor, Richard Hayes, ordered me away for six weeks, so I took a seaside house in Glengarriff for myself and Mother. Father came down for a fortnight, but it nearly broke his heart.

  The Eucharistic Congress was being held in Dublin, and during the preparations Russell got himself involved in a newspaper controversy with a Jesuit whom he slaughtered. The Jesuit complained to me about his conduct. ‘There were three courses open to Mr Russell: he could have denied my major, denied my minor, or said that my conclusion did not follow. What did Mr Russell do? He ignored my syllogism entirely. That is not the conduct of a gentleman.’

  Russell came to spend the week at the Congress with me, and Osborn Bergin accompanied him. On the way down he was interviewed by a reporter from the Cork Examiner and not only denounced the Eucharistic Congress, but recited in full Oisin’s great tirade against St Patrick. Bergin discovered a mistake in the recitation, but he told me admiringly that he could not have believed in such a perfect verbal memory. After having let off all that steam Russell was in high spirits and his conversation was full of mischief and invention. While Bergin and I swam, he sat on a rock, sketching and commenting to the Celtic gods on the thunder that rolled promisingly in the distance.

  ‘Oh, come on, come on, Mananan! You can do better than that. All I want you to do is to wash out those damned Christian idolators.’

  Bergin’s swimming was like his scholarship. He could only do the breaststroke, but he did it perfectly and effortlessly, and when I attempted the crawl he trod water and glared at me, even without glasses. ‘What’s all the splashing about?’ he asked.

  I rowed them to Bryce’s island, where Russell had stayed as a young man. ‘I gather I should encourage you with a boat song,’ he said. ‘As I can’t sing, I’ll recite instead.’ And he did. His high spirits were dimmed when Mrs Bryce took us to a corner of the island and said, ‘Don’t you remember this, A.E.? This is where you saw the vision.’

  ‘There are places like that, you know,’ he said curtly to me, but I saw that he was glad to escape from her and suspected that he was just a little tired of elderly ladies reminding him of the mystical experiences of his youth, particularly when he had managed to forget all about them himself.

  Each day as we went walking we found a young painter stationed in the roadway with his easel, painting like mad and pretending that he did not know who Russell was, until Bergin and I flatly told Russell he would have to talk to the young man. He was genuinely shocked. He may have seen the vision, but he did not see the painter. Next day he went straight up to the easel and gave his views with his usual frankness and kindness.

  ‘Young man, I think you’ve been painting in a rather dry climate?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ve just come from Spain.’

  ‘Well, this isn’t Spain, you know. This is a very damp climate. Between us and those mountains there are half a dozen planes of moisture. Those are what gives it its luminousness.’

  After supper the three of us went up the hill to the field where the young painter was camping out, and as Russell squatted happily on a rock to look at his pictures a country girl rose, like an apparition against the sky, above a loose stone wall with something large clapped to her backside.

  ‘Well, Nellie?’ the young painter said, and she held up a portrait of herself as though dissociating herself entirely from it.

  ‘Dey say ’tis AWFUL!’ she said.

  The poor young painter was getting a bad time that night, for as we left I heard Bergin chuckling happily to himself.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  ‘Twenty-two per cent,’ said Bergin.*

  Next evening another painter – a much more famous one – dropped into the hotel to see Russell, and he was in a state of intense misery. He had studied Glengarriff closely, and except for one old wooden pier by the hotel there was nothing at all to paint.

  ‘Nothing?’ Russell said delightedly. ‘All those mountains and woods and water?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said the painter. ‘It is all too saturated with the essence of what it is.’

  It was a delightful holiday, but it was the last flash of the gay and youthful Russell. He was becoming more and more angry and afraid before the new Establishment of priests and politicians, particularly Sean MacEntee and de Valera. One night he really frightened me by cursing de Valera in the way I had seen old women in Cork curse – raising his arms above his head and giving himself up entirely to his emotion.

  ‘I curse that man as generations of Irishmen to come will curse him – the man who destroyed our country!’

  One night that winter he came to my flat, bewildered and distraught. He told me that he had just received a warning that he had only a short time to live. I knew he did not mean that he had seen a doctor: he was much too plain-spoken to conceal a fact like that, and besides, when his illness really became a subject for doctors he was the first to accept their optimistic prognosis.

  ‘I wasn’t told how soon,’ he said. ‘I dare say it could be a month or a year.’ He was not afraid of death, but he was afraid of the pain and the humiliations that would precede it – ‘the immortal soul being kicked out of the world like an old sick dog with a canister tied to its tail’.

  I did my best to comfort him, but it was not very successful, partly, I suppose, because I did not really believe in his premonition, but largely because I had little or nothing of the genuine religious feeling of himself and Yeats. It was not for lack of good will. I knew that their search for religious truth, no matter what absurdities it had led them into, had given them an intellectual richness that I had not got; I had let them argue with me and had read the books Russell lent me, but it hadn’t affected my own way of thinking in the slightest.

  ‘Why do you shut your eyes to those things, O’Connor?’ Yeats stormed at me once when I told him the story of an old priest in Ballingeary who was supposed to have been shot by the Queen of the Fairies. ‘You know perfectly well that things like that were once the religion of the whole world.’ On another occasion, when I had to tell Russell that I had got nothing from a reading of Mme Blavatsky, he replied angrily, ‘Oh, you needn’t tell me! Like all Irish Catholics you are just an atheist at heart.’

  That night, after we had discussed his premonition of death, Russell and I talked of the immortality of the soul, and he gradually began to brighten up.

  ‘Socrates is the fellow I want to meet,’ he said, laughing. ‘I have lots of questions to ask him about some of the things Plato makes him say. Who do you want to meet? Tolstoy, I suppose?’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘Certainly not Tolstoy.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand Tolstoy either. I don’t mind being told about my faults by people who like me, but Tolstoy didn’t like anybody.’

  And curiously, when he left and I accompanied him home, he was in the highest of spirits again. He had talked himself happy.

  But a week or two later I was seeing him home again and quoted a poem I had just written which began:

  A patriot frenzy enduring too long

  Can hang like a stone on the heart of a man,

  And I have made Ireland too much of my song;

  I will not bid those foolish old dreams to begone.

  He stopped dead at the corner of Appian Way and threw his arms in the air in a frenzy.

  ‘That’s exactly how I feel,’ he cried. ‘I have to get out of this country before it drives me mad.’

  Soon afterwards he told me that he had made up his mind to give up his Dublin house and take a flat in London. He also talked of going on a world cruise and visiting his son Diarmuid, who had married in America.

  Yeats was puzzled, and as always when there was something that he did not understand, inclined to mockery.

  ‘Indian saints give up the world when they reach a certain age,’ he said to me. ‘Russell is a saint, but he is also a great journalist, so he’s giving up the world to go on a world cruise.’

  Nothing could have been wider
of the mark. Of all the men I have known, Russell was most a creature of habit, and for him to give up everything – his house, his books, his pictures, his friends – was already a sort of death. Unless, indeed, it is that these were the death he wished to escape from, the inextricable patterns of habit that encompassed his fiery soul. Whatever it was against which he had erected them had breached them at last. I would have done anything to comfort him, but how can you comfort a man who does not weep, who perhaps himself does not know what it is he wants to weep about?

  He asked me to come to his house the week before his departure and take whatever I wanted of his things, but I could not endure the thought of taking things that had been dear to him, and I did not go.

  Then one evening Higgins came to my flat with peremptory instructions from Russell to bring me along with him. Higgins himself was close to tears, and I had never liked him so much as I did that evening.

  ‘You’ll have to come,’ he said. ‘A.E. will be hurt if you don’t come, the man is hurt enough.’

  ‘How can I go to the house of a man who’s hurt like that and take his things away?’ I asked.

  ‘How do you think of it?’ Higgins asked. ‘I’ve had to sit there and listen while they said, “Oh, A.E., I wonder if you could let me have that nice little drawing by So-and-So?” You should see the greed in those fellows’ eyes.’

  I went back with him. Russell’s face was like a tragic mask as he showed other friends about the rooms and let them take his little treasures. By this time I was as emotional as Higgins, and the longing to weep only made me angry. I told Russell that I did not want to take anything of his, and he said in a broken voice, ‘You mustn’t leave without taking something. I put aside a set of Jack Yeats’ broadsheets for you. I know you admire Jack Yeats. Do please take them.’

  I stayed on and Higgins stayed with me and we made casual conversation as we might have done at a wake, only that on this occasion the corpse made one of the company. When we left, the pubs were shut. Otherwise I think we would have got blind drunk.

  Russell left for London, and for the first few months our friendship remained as close as ever. As anyone might have predicted, London was a disappointment to him.

  ‘It is really a dead country,’ he wrote to me, ‘but there are very nice people among the dead, and if they were only alive they would be the best people in the world.’

  He wrote to me that he was unwell and that his London doctor had diagnosed colitis. That evening, when I was walking on Sandy-mount Strand with my own doctor, Richard Hayes, I showed him the letter.

  ‘I am very sorry to say that is not colitis,’ he said after a moment. ‘That is cancer.’

  I did not take this any more seriously than I had taken Russell’s own premonitions, but I was deeply upset by certain caustic remarks Higgins reported him as having made, and our friendship cooled off. It was only long after, when I got to know Higgins better, that I wondered whether those unpleasant remarks had ever been made outside the excitable, devious imagination of Higgins himself, because that Till Eulenspiegel of a man delighted in nothing so much as embroiling mutual friends and then grieving uproariously over the sufferings of both.

  When Russell died, he grieved louder than ever, because Yeats refused to speak over the grave. ‘If I spoke I should have had to tell all the truth’ is the excuse Higgins reported his making, but what that meant I do not know – unless, perhaps, Higgins had made mischief between Russell and Yeats as well. I made the speech, and Yeats stood behind me, an old man who looked as though he had not long to live himself, and opposite me, at the other side of the grave, was de Valera (in those days it was not considered a sin for a Catholic to attend a Protestant funeral). When I had finished, Yeats in his generous way stepped forward and took my hand, saying in a loud voice so as to be heard by everybody, ‘Very fine! Very noble!’ and then, in a whisper, ‘Have you copies for the Press?’

  Of course I hadn’t, which is probably as well because in those days I could be both pompous and silly. What I should say now is, ‘This was the man who was father to three generations of Irish poets, and there is nothing more to be said.’

  Later, when I told Yeats how strange it was to speak about Russell, with all his enemies round the grave, he grumbled, ‘I know. I saw them too. I’ll beat them yet, though. I’ve arranged to be buried in Sligo where nobody but my friends will follow me.’

  Poor man! That was all he knew.

  14

  Richard Hayes, the man who had spotted what was wrong with Russell, was the local dispensary doctor. I had gone to him in the ordinary way as a patient, and we had become friends. He was a tall, thin man with a melancholy face, a big nose and prominent chin that made you think of a punchinello. In the evenings he called for me and we went for walks along Sandymount Strand, dropping into his house on Guilford Road on the way back for a cup of coffee or a drink. Years before, in the internment camp, I had noticed how uninquisitive and unrevealing men friends can be, and it was only after I had known him for some time that I realized that he was one of the heroes of the 1916 Rebellion and had been sentenced to death by the British. His brother, a delightful old priest from County Limerick to whom he introduced me, had also distinguished himself by defying some British general. As Irish people put things, the Hayeses were a ‘decent’ family.

  I discovered it only by accident and by what later seemed dramatic irony. One evening when he was coming to my flat I invited James Montgomery, the film censor, and his wife. Montgomery was one of the greatest of the Dublin wits and, though I had no great liking for wit and detested the Dublin brand, I was very attached to Montgomery. He was a natty little man with a red face and a Roman nose and an extraordinary sweetness of character, as though he had been steeped for a decade in a vat of port wine. He is the man I think of in the part of Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and a prig like Darcy might account him a failure, because his talent, which was cynical, was at war with his temperament, which was humble and given to hero-worship.

  Like Mr Bennet, Montgomery had his domestic troubles, for he was married for the second time to a great beauty, much younger than himself, and their verbal tussles were part of the Dublin legend. She indulged in palmistry, and that night she read Hayes’ palm and said, ‘There’s some terrible crisis here. It’s as though you’d died, and then started to live again.’ Hayes was slightly shaken and left early, and Montgomery said excitedly to me, ‘You realized what the crisis was, didn’t you? He was sentenced to death and then reprieved. Ethel hasn’t a notion who he is.’

  A day or two later Hayes said to me, ‘You didn’t know the crisis Mrs Montgomery was referring to. It was true enough. I was only once in love, and then it was with a girl who had tuberculosis. I was a doctor, and I knew how long she had to live. I couldn’t bear the thought that my children might be the same way, so I gave her up.’

  Hayes’ main interest was the Irish on the continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He had admirable manners; a trifle too elegant – even pompous – but no more disconcerting than those of the few French aristocrats I have met. I felt sure that the poor people of Ringsend adored him, because, though he stormed and screamed at them when they got him out of bed or interrupted him late at night when he was reading, he always went to them, always on foot.

  His scenes with them were also very French. ‘What are you saying? Why don’t you speak up, man? How do you expect me to hear you? I asked what your name was… Murphy? Never heard of you, my good man. Your wife is poorly? I don’t know your wife, and I don’t know you. How long has your wife been “poorly”?’

  ‘Well, she was took bad this morning, Doctor.’

  ‘She was took bad this morning! And you wait until midnight to drag me out of my house in the pouring rain! What sort of conduct is that?’

  ‘Well, Doctor, I only got in myself at half six.’

  ‘Oh, so you got in at half six. Your day’s work is over at six o’clock and nobody can disturb you. But when
will I get in? You make me sick! Where did you say you live?’

  They knew he got into such tizzies, and if the truth was known probably enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed the other sort of tizzies he got into. He would fly into sudden, old-maidish fits of self-righteousness when he felt that the memory of some famous Irishman was being slighted. O’Faolain and Frank MacDermott, working on the manuscript of the Wolfe Tone autobiography, had discovered a passage that Tone’s son had omitted which showed that Tone, the great lover, had had a mistress, and Hayes pleaded with me to persuade O’Faolain not to publish it. I laughed so hard that he complained of me to a group of his old political associates at Sean MacEntee’s, and they laughed even louder.

  ‘You may laugh,’ he said pompously to me, standing up before the fireplace. ‘But you remember what Goethe said – “The Irish are always like a pack of mongrels dragging down some noble stag.”’

  ‘You got that quotation from Yeats, Dick.’

  ‘Never mind where I got it. It’s true!’

  ‘And neither you nor Yeats ever read a word of Goethe in your lives. If you had, you’d know that the “noble stag” was the Duke of Wellington and the mongrels were O’Connell and his party.’

  ‘Oh, what rubbish!’ he snorted, all his indignation diverted for the time being on to Goethe.

  I enjoyed those evening strolls with him because he raised his hat and bowed very low to every poor slum woman he knew, and saluted every man, and sometimes would stop to introduce them and make them show off. He bent his long frame in two like a jack-knife, his walking stick thrust out from behind his back like a tail and his punchinello face distorted with amiability, and said in that angular way of his, ‘Oh, Jim, I wonder if you would mind telling my friend that shocking experience of yours with the Black and Tans – you remember, that night they threw you into the river? I often wonder how you survived it.’