He even brought me with him on his visits to the slums and introduced me as a young doctor, inviting my opinion on certain marks and symptoms, but after the first time I refused to go. I thought it might be dangerous for himself and felt it was humiliating to patients. As a doctor he did not see it in that light at all. He liked them, and he gave them better service than they would have had from most doctors they would have had to pay.
I am not observant, and for a long time it did not strike me as strange that this distinguished man should be in such a modest job, for even at medicine, which he usually merely made fun of, struck me as brilliant: I have described how he had diagnosed Russell’s disease from a few lines in a letter. It took me even longer to realize that, far from having been slighted, Hayes had refused every sinecure he had been offered. It was when we argued about this that I came across the other side of the man – the side that did not ring altogether true – a mock modesty that amounted to arrogance.
Then one day the British and Irish Press were full of the story that he was to be made Governor-General – representative of the British King in Ireland. I thought he would be an admirable choice. That night, after he had dodged the reporters, we went for our walk as usual and argued all the way. He protested rhetorically and insincerely that it was not a position for someone like himself, an obscure dispensary doctor with an amateur’s interest in history. Suddenly the humour of it seemed to strike him and he stopped and laughed loudly and heartily.
‘You needn’t tell me what you really think, O’Donovan,’ he said. (He called me O’Donovan only when he wanted to mark the distance between us.) ‘I can see the very thought in your mind.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he replied, bending double and thrusting his jaw forward with a glitter of daft humour in his eyes. ‘You’re thinking that never before in your life have you had to deal with a man of such insane vanity.’
Almost literally this had been what I was thinking, and my protest did not come quick enough.
‘I knew it,’ he said with a crow of triumph. ‘And you’re right, of course. I am mad with vanity.’
For several years he was my dearest friend, the man who replaced Corkery in my affections, to whom I went in every difficulty and who gave me advice that was always disinterested and sometimes noble. This, of course, was not all clear gain. This dependence on older men was part of the price one had to pay for being a Mother’s Boy. It was not he who suggested that I should write a play about the Irish Invincibles or a biography of Michael Collins, but I doubt if without him I should have written either. That might have been small loss, but without him I should have had no help from any of Collins’ friends. Some had not even helped Beasley,* who was himself one of Collins’ associates, but they were prepared to do anything for Hayes. It was the first time I realized the extent of his influence.
We had one extraordinary experience while I was writing the book. The hardest man in Ireland to get at was Joe O’Reilly, Collins’ personal servant, his messenger boy, his nurse, and nobody – literally nobody – knew what O’Reilly could tell if he chose, or could even guess why he did not tell it. He was then Aide-de-Camp to the Governor-General; a handsome, brightly spoken, golf-playing man who could have posed anywhere for the picture of the All-American Male.
Hayes’ invitation brought him to the house in Guilford Road one evening, and for a couple of hours I had the experience that every biographer knows and dreads. Here was this attractive, friendly, handsome man, completely master of himself, apparently ready to tell everything, but in reality determined on telling nothing.
Hayes was puzzled – after all, he was a historian – and he took over the questioning himself. He was a much more skilful questioner than I, but he too got nowhere.
And then, suddenly, when I was ready to give up and go home, O’Reilly collapsed – if the word even suggests what really happened, which was more like a building caving in. Something had gone wrong with him. Either he had drunk too much, which I thought unlikely because he was perfectly lucid, or, accidentally, either Hayes or I had hypnotized him.
I can remember distinctly the question that precipitated his collapse. I had asked, ‘How did Collins behave when he had to have someone shot?’ and O’Reilly began his reply carefully, even helpfully, in such a way that it could be of no possible use to me. Then he suddenly jumped up, thrust his hands in his trousers pockets and began to stamp about the room, digging his heels in with a savagery that almost shook the house. Finally he threw himself on to a sofa, picked up a newspaper, which he pretended to read, tossed it aside after a few moments and said in a coarse country voice, ‘Jesus Christ Almighty, how often have I to tell ye?…’ It was no longer Joe O’Reilly who was in the room. It was Michael Collins, and for close on two hours I had an experience that must be every biographer’s dream, of watching someone I had never known as though he were still alive. Every gesture, every intonation was imprinted on O’Reilly’s brain as if on tape.
I had seen that auto-hypnotism only once before. That was in 1932 when Mother and I were travelling by bus from Bantry. One of the passengers was a violent, cynical, one-legged man who began to beg, and the conductor was too afraid to interfere with him. I took an intense loathing to him and refused to give him money, but he was much less interested in me than in some members of a pipers’ band who were also travelling. He demanded that they should play for him, and when they merely looked out of the windows he began to imitate the bagpipes himself. After a time I realized that the bagpipes he was imitating were those he had heard during some battle in France fifteen years before. The bagpipes hypnotized him, and now he began imitating the sound of a German scouting plane, the big guns, the whistle of the shells, and as they fell silent he began to mutter in a low frenzied voice to someone who was beside him. ‘Hey, Jim! Give us a clip there, Jim! They’re coming! Hurry! Jim, Jim!’ He reached over to shake someone and then started and sighed. Then he took an ammunition belt that was not there from the shoulders of someone who was long dead and slung it over his own, fitted a clip – that gesture I knew so well – into the heavy stick he carried and began to fire over the back of the seat. Suddenly he sprang into the air and fell in the centre of the bus, unconscious it seemed, and for some reason we were all too embarrassed to do anything. After a few minutes he groaned and reached out to touch his leg – the one that wasn’t there. Then he got to his feet and sat back in his seat perfectly silent. I have rarely been so ashamed of myself as I was that day.
But the scene with O’Reilly was almost worse because you could see not only Collins, but also the effect he was having upon a gentle, sensitive boy, and it made you want to intervene between a boy who was no longer there and a ghost. I did it even at the risk of breaking the record. He was sobbing when he described how Collins had crucified him till he decided to leave. ‘Here!’ was all Collins replied. ‘Take this letter on your way.’
‘But didn’t anybody tell him to lay off you?’ I asked angrily.
‘Yes, the girl next door,’ he said. She said, ‘Collins, do you know what you’re doing to that boy?’ And Mick said (and suddenly Collins was back in the room again), ‘I know his value better than you do. He goes to Mass for me every morning. Jesus Christ, do you think I don’t know what he’s worth to me?’
When O’Reilly left, the handsome, sprightly young man had disappeared. In his place was an elderly, bewildered man, and you could see what he would be like if Collins had lived. Hayes detained me, and as he refilled my glass he asked, ‘Have you ever seen anything so extraordinary?’ We both doubted if O’Reilly would turn up next evening.
He did; but this time he looked like the ghost. He gave me a pathetic, accusing look.
‘I don’t know what you did to me last night,’ he muttered. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I never did anything like that before. I can’t stop. It’s going on in my head the whole time. I have to talk about it.’
He did so for the rest of the e
vening, and once again Collins was there. Nowadays a tape-recorder in the next room would probably catch most of it, but I had no way of getting it down because I did not dare take out a notebook.
The sequel to that was interesting too, for when the book on Collins was published O’Reilly was reputed to be going through Dublin like a madman, threatening to shoot me. One day, he and I met in the middle of Grafton Street. There was no escaping him and I stopped. ‘I’ve been trying to see you,’ he muttered. ‘Come in here for a cup of tea.’ I went along with him, wondering what I had started, but all he wanted was to tell me the book had already gone out of print and he wanted a half-dozen copies to send to friends. Reality, I suppose, is like that. One looks at it and turns away, appalled by the Gorgon’s head. And then one realizes that one has lived with it, that one has no other reality than the fact that one has once looked at it with naked eyes and survived.
Some years previously Hayes had published a couple of books on the Irish in France, which had had a sort of local success, but had scarcely paid for the cost of their production. He was now writing a book on the French Invasion of Ireland. I accompanied him on some of his trips in search of material. Again, his wide influence worked wonderfully. Sean McKeon led us to one old man whose grandfather had told him the story of the invasion. It was an extraordinary experience because the old man was a character out of Thomas Hardy, a mere vehicle. He pronounced the name of the French General, Hoche, in the French way, and then added apologetically, ‘That’s how grandfather used to say it, Oche.’
Although I had done some work on that book, there was no reason for my name to appear in it at all. Yet in the final draft, Hayes intended to print a few lines of a ‘98 song which I had translated for his amusement. But after an interview with his publisher he came to my flat while my mother was staying with me. Everything else the publishers would stand – but not my name on the title-page. According to Hayes’ version of the interview, I had mistranslated the lines, misinterpreted the sentiments.
The lines, for all the little importance they have, were:
The sturdy Frenchman, with ships in order,
Beneath sharp masts is long at sea;
They’re always saying they will come to Ireland
And they will set the poor Irish free.
Rather than sacrifice the book, he had sacrificed the lines, and I had heartily agreed with him. At that time, rather than see that book unpublished, I would have eaten everything I had ever written. But years later this event was sharply brought back to my mind when Dick Hayes himself was the author of an attempt to censor my writings.
15
The other friend of those years in Dublin was the curate in the Star of the Sea church in Sandymount, Tim Traynor. I had met him first through Sean O’Faolain when he was curate in Adam and Eve’s church. He brought us down to the vaults to see the coffin of Leonard MacNally, the informer who betrayed Robert Emmett, and as we left he gave the coffin a thundering kick. He did the same with all visitors, and it was something you liked or did not like as the case might be. It was so typical of Traynor that I liked it.
We became friends only when he came as curate to Sandymount and lived in the presbytery in Leahy’s Terrace – beautifully described by Joyce. It was almost the fashion to say that he was an interesting man who should never have been a priest, and Hayes – the seed and breed of priests and himself everything I admired in certain priests of the older generation – said it to me several times. I knew he was warning me against Traynor, and if he had seen me at a country race-meeting, putting on bets for Traynor, who was not allowed to bet himself, he would have said it even louder. They disapproved of one another, and Traynor in his conspiratorial way told me that Hayes owned slum property.
He had the sort of face that I now see oftener in New York and Boston than in Ireland – the pugilistic Irish face, beefy and red and scowling, with features that seemed to have withdrawn into it to guard it from blows; a broad, blunted nose and a square jaw. Except for the good looks, it had a lot in common with the face of Fred Higgins, as his character had a lot in common with Higgins’, for when I described Higgins as a Protestant with all the vices of a Catholic I might, but for the one small difference, have been describing Traynor. He was as conspiratorial as Higgins and much more malicious. If you were injured by one of Higgins’ intrigues there was nothing much to blame for it but the will of God, but Traynor, in pursuing some imaginary grievance, would invent and carry through cruel practical jokes. When he swaggered into my room of an evening I would sometimes ask, ‘Well, which is it to be tonight, Nero, Napoleon or St Francis of Assisi?’ Most often it was Nero.
‘It’s that fellow Jenkins. Wait till I tell you!’
Yet I never really felt that he was not a good priest, and he gave me an understanding of and sympathy with the Irish priesthood which even the antics of its silliest members have not been able to affect. It was merely that his temperament and imagination constantly overflowed the necessary limits of his vocation as they would have overflowed the limits of almost any calling, short of that of a pirate. Yet they also enriched his character, so that you felt if he lived for another twenty years he would be a very fine priest indeed. It was significant to me that our old friend, the Tailor of Gougane Barra, who had a trick of nicknaming all his acquaintances in ways that stuck instantly, christened Hayes ‘The Old Child’ and Traynor ‘The Saint’. There was an element of childishness in Hayes, and you always underestimated Traynor if you paid attention only to the devil and forgot the saint.
It was characteristic of him that he became really friendly with me only when he discovered that as boys we had both had a romantic crush on the same girl. He had had better fortune than I, for one night he had seen Natalie home from college up Summer Hill, and all the way they had held hands without exchanging a word. When the man she was proposing to marry had held back, she had complained of him to Traynor; he had advised her and they had remained friends until her death.
It was also characteristic of him that when I left his rooms that night he insisted on my taking the only picture he had of her. That was not only the new friend and the outburst of generosity; it was also the priest who knew he should not brood on a dead girl’s picture.
But, of course, he brooded just the same. The emotional expansiveness that overflowed the limitations of his profession made him brood on all the might-have-beens of his life, and they were endless. I used to make fun of his rooms, which were a museum of all the might-have-beens: books on science, history, art; paintings, sculptures, a shotgun that needed cleaning and a cinematograph that wouldn’t work – all passions pursued with fury for a few weeks till each in turn joined the exhibits on view. It was not only Nero and St Francis who alternated in his strange, complex character, but Einstein, Michelangelo and Gibbon as well.
Sometimes, when I visited him he would come to meet me with the big fist out, swaggering with excitement.
‘How are you? You’re looking fine. You’ll have a drink. Listen! I have a great wine here. This is something special.’ (Just like a boy with a new gadget.)
‘How much did it cost, Tim?’
‘Five and six,’ he would say wonderingly, turning back from the drink cupboard. ‘He had only a case of it left. Wasn’t I lucky? Wait till you try it!’
Wine was only a sketch of an escape route, because Traynor was no drinker. Another, and more profitable one, was a career in the world. One evening, when he came to me, acutely depressed about some frustration, I asked, ‘Tim, why the hell don’t you cut your hook and get out?’
Traynor had no intention of cutting his hook, and he knew me too well to imagine that I was slighting his vocation; it was the chance of exploring another might-have-been that attracted him.
‘Why?’ he asked shamefastly. ‘What could I do if I did get out?’
‘You wouldn’t starve.’
‘Maybe I wouldn’t, but what could I do?’
‘If you’d gone to America five years
ago you’d probably be a millionaire by now.’
‘Do you think so?’ (By this time he was beginning to light up again.)
‘I’m damn sure of it. I can easily see you in a big office, giving everyone hell.’
‘You might be right,’ he admitted wistfully. ‘I’d love to be able to get things done.’
He was always trying to get things done, and he wasn’t always as successful as he was with St Brigid’s thighbone. This was a marvellous story, and all the more remarkable because he did not realize how funny it was. He was curate of a new church in Killester which was being dedicated to St Brigid, and in one of his manic phases Traynor imagined how wonderful it would be if the church contained a genuine relic of the saint. The only reported relic was a thighbone, which was in a convent somewhere in the Peninsula – Portugal, I think, or it may have been Spain. He got round his parish priest – parish priests are the bane of an active curate’s life – received the blessing of the kindly old archbishop, Byrne, and set off armed with letters of introduction to the Portuguese Department of Antiquities, the Portuguese Foreign Office, and above all to the Cardinal who controlled the contents of churches, monasteries and convents throughout the country.
The trouble was he could not get anywhere near the Cardinal.
Day after day he haunted the Cardinal’s palace, and the greasy Monsignore who acted as his secretary said regretfully that the Cardinal was away, that he was opening a convent outside the city, was at lunch with some gentleman from the Curia, or was merely taking his siesta and could not be disturbed. Meanwhile Traynor’s leave of absence had almost expired, and he dreaded the thought of returning to Dublin without having accomplished anything whatever.
‘I was desperate, I tell you,’ he said, scowling with remembered panic. ‘That last day I went up I saw the same greasy brute. No, the Cardinal was lying down. No, immediately he got up he would have to leave for an important engagement. So I said to myself, “There’s nothing those dagos can do to me. I’m not in my own diocese.” And I just took out my wallet and handed the Monsignore a pound note. “For your charities, Monsignore,” I said, and he glanced back over his shoulder and said, “Wait a moment, Father. I think I hear His Eminence’s footsteps. Perhaps he hasn’t retired yet. Do come in.”
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