An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  Hayes arrived soon after and spent nearly half an hour in her room. I waited in the hall, and when he came out I saw from his look that he had no hope. He put his arm about me and drew me into the front room, shutting the door behind him. ‘It’s easier for you to hear this from me than from someone else,’ he said gently. ‘I’m afraid she isn’t going to live. Her shoulder and pelvis are broken, and I’ve never known an elderly person who survived it. Even if she did, she’d never walk again. All the same, she is a remarkable woman, and I’d be happier if we could get a specialist to see her. It’s late, but if I can get Charlie Macauley on the phone he may come. Charlie was very attached to his own mother.’

  Macauley was at home and came out immediately. While we waited for him, Hayes said: ‘It’s extraordinary. Do you realize that that woman has had chronic appendicitis since she was a girl, and never even told a doctor about it.’ Macauley confirmed Hayes’ opinion and advised me not to expect the impossible. He insisted on getting her into a nursing home immediately, and about midnight the ambulance took her to one in Eccles Street. I walked home through the dark streets, knowing I should not sleep. I had to break the news to Father yet, and I knew he would blame me, as I blamed myself. And what made it hardest was to think of the stoicism with which she had all her life borne the pain of chronic appendicitis, knowing she could not afford to go to a doctor or take the time to enter a hospital.

  When I saw her next day Mother was still resigned to death, but she got some very interesting stories from the nurses. On the following day she complained that she looked a sight and that the nurses could not do her hair, so I combed and brushed it for her. ‘A private room in a nursing home,’ she said, closing her eyes, ‘sure it must be costing a fortune,’ and anyhow, even from bed, she could look after me better than I could do for myself. I met Macauley outside her room and told him. ‘The funny thing is, she probably will go home,’ he said. ‘At this very moment I’m looking after a girl patient who did exactly the same thing to herself on the hunting field, and she’ll never walk again.’ It was ten days before Mother did come home, and then the McGarrys gave up their beautiful drawing-room on the ground floor to her. But she was very embarrassed at having to wear a dressing-gown when she went to and from the bathroom. ‘My goodness,’ she said, ‘you could meet anybody in that hall.’ After that, the dressing-gown was put away, and I had to dress and undress her as well as brush and put up her hair.

  Meanwhile I had arranged to take my holiday in Switzerland, to see a specialist on my own account – a famous doctor who had been a friend of Thomas Mann at Davos – but Minnie Connolly’s letters from Cork were alarming. Father, well-informed by me about the gravity of the situation, had chosen it as an excuse for an uproarious drunk. I knew what life with him would be like while Mother couldn’t even climb a stair, much less go out to the pub to ‘get in’ for him. Instead, I took her with me to Switzerland. The journey, of course, was an intolerable chore. Mother was much too modest to look for the ‘Ladies’ herself; I had to find it and lead her to it. And, like all chores for her, it turned into joy. Mother made an intimate friend of the chambermaid in the London hotel, and got her life story from a nice girl she had chummed up with in Trafalgar Square. She disliked Paris, because no one could tell her any interesting life stories. Besides, she hated French coffee and broke into tears on me when I took her up to the Basilica in Montmartre and bought her some. However, Switzerland made up for it, and she liked to sit on the terrace of the hotel and listen to the crowds yodelling on the little pleasure boats passing up and down from Geneva and to go on the funicular to some little mountain chapel where she could say her prayers and listen to the cow-bells tinkling in the evening. She also made friends with a Swiss lady who spoke excellent English and was good enough to tell her the story of her life. It was all much more like home.

  She cramped my style, for I had intended when I was finished with the doctor to tramp over one of the passes into Italy as Irish pilgrims had done in the seventh and eighth centuries, but still I felt a sort of enchantment in the holiday. It was like the fulfilment of a prophecy, the accidental keeping of promises made to her as a small boy, when she came in exhausted by a hard day’s work and I airily described to her – all out of a guide-book and a couple of phrase-books – the wonderful journeys we should make when I was older and had come into my own. And the enchantment was only sharpened by the feeling of guilt we both had when we worried about my foolish father staggering home in Harrington’s Square when the public-houses shut.

  Father survived Mother’s absence, but on her return he made it clear that he thought I had had more than my share of her. Life in Harrington’s Square was restored to its rigid pattern more firmly than ever, despite Mother’s wistful reminiscences of the Continent. It was some years before the occasion Father had been looking forward to for so long occurred, and I found myself responsible for a woman and her son, waiting for the end of ecclesiastical and divorce court proceedings so that I could marry. Of course, I had been asking for that. You can’t live on two levels – the level of the imagination in what concerns yourself and the level of reason in what concerns others – for sooner or later the two will change places; and no consideration of expediency had ever really deterred me from getting into situations which my experience did not qualify me to deal with. Every humiliation that can be inflicted on a man who tries to live by his imagination and doesn’t know the rules of the group to which he aspires I had gone through, and this was merely the greatest of them.

  Mother came to stay and was reassured, as I knew she would be, for she could deal with any situation, no matter how preposterous from her point of view, so long as she could size it up for herself. After she went back, it was Father’s turn, because somehow or other my life would not have been complete unless he had seen me in my new part as a father myself. I think now that perhaps I built too much on that; perhaps I always built too much on his visits, hoping each time that at last things between us would be as they should have been from the start and that I could confide in him things I could not have confided even in Mother. When I rushed to open the carriage door for him, he staggered out, very drunk. He must have been all right before he left home or Mother would have kept him there, but he had had a long wait at Waterford for a connexion, and boredom or nervousness had proved too much for him.

  I got him home and put him to bed, but not before the child had seen him. I knew the boy’s look because it had been my own at his age, and faced with this disaster I wasn’t a day older than he. I knew I couldn’t control Father; nobody could control him when he was like that, and I lay awake, shivering as if in a fever and going through the whole nightmare of my childhood again. I must have fallen asleep, for in the early hours of the morning I found he had got out, and knew what had happened. He was rambling mad through the countryside, looking for a public-house and hammering at the door for drink. Later I went to search for him and when I found him said, ‘This can’t go on. I have trouble enough in this place already.’ ‘I know, I know,’ he muttered stupidly. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I’ll go back by the next train. I’ll be better at home.’ ‘I’m afraid you will,’ I said, and later that day saw him off from the little station. My heart was torn with pity and remorse because I knew that was no way to behave to a dog, let alone to someone you loved, and yet I could not control the childish terror and hatred that he had instilled into me so long ago when he threw us out in our nightclothes on the street, or attacked Mother with an open razor.

  I never saw him again. A few weeks later war broke out and communications collapsed. What was worse for people of Father’s generation, tea was rationed to a fraction of what people in Britain were allowed, and when he wasn’t on the booze he had nothing else to drink. It was part of the poverty of our class that we grew up literally on bread and tea and never really felt hungry if we had enough of both. Mother and Father did what the rest of their generation did and left the tea-leaves in the pot to be watered again
and again till the last colouring had gone from them. When I worried about it, it wasn’t of Mother but of him I was thinking, for apart from liquor he had no other resource.

  He died as he had lived, blundering drunk about Cork in the last stages of pneumonia, sustained by nothing but his giant physique (my cousin Christy, who looked after him, told me at the funeral about the big black stain that appeared about his heart when he died). Mother refused to tell me anything until he was dead. This was something I found hard to forgive, because though with half her mind she felt she was saving me anxiety, deep down there was something else, not far removed from resentment – the feeling that I wouldn’t understand and that I never had understood. She was like a loving woman who, when her husband has been unfaithful to her, blames not the husband, but the other woman. ‘That damned drink!’ she would cry bitterly, always implying that it was the drink that followed Father, not Father the drink, and in this she was probably wiser than I. But she felt that only she could have the patience to deal with him when he was dying and to realize that he must be allowed to die in his own way, not mine, as in later years she followed him with Masses and prayers, knowing as no one else could know, how lost and embarrassed that shy, home-keeping man would be with no Minnie O’Connor to come home to, no home, no Cork, no pension, astray in the infinite wastes of eternity.

  THREE

  The Abbey Theatre

  17

  Lennox Robinson, who at Corkery’s request had given me my first job, had been a director of the Abbey Theatre since Lady Gregory’s day. It was against Robinson that F. R. Higgins intrigued so passionately, although Robinson was a much better intriguer than Higgins himself and, in the beginning at least, much closer to Yeats. When I knew Yeats first and would visit him at his home, Robinson frequently strolled in towards the end of an evening to report on how the play at the Abbey was doing and how much had been taken at the box office. Usually the children refused to go to sleep until Robinson had come to say goodnight to them, and children do not feel like that towards a man unless he is a good one.

  Robinson was very good to me. Although he had been tight about my wages when he took me on as an assistant librarian, he made up for it when I came to Dublin almost a stranger. He took me to the Abbey with him, let me sit in on rehearsals and introduced me to the players. Occasionally he invited me to spend the night with him. He lived in a small house on the shore of Dublin Bay with his mother, a sweet old lady from County Cork, who was glad to talk, even to a Papist, about places and people she knew there. She called Robinson ‘Stuart’ (his real name was Esmé Stuart Lennox, in memory of some remote Scottish ancestor), and it was clear that Stuart to her was an entirely different person from this lanky, remote, melancholy man who kissed her goodnight at ten o’clock and then brought out the whiskey decanter and drank himself stupid before morning.

  He had been something of a musician, and when the whiskey was lowered and the french window open on the rocks over the strand, he would play his gramophone. He mocked me in his brilliant, bitter way, because I was uneducated and did not really admire any music but that of the three or four composers I knew well. He would deliberately play music he knew I would not like, but sometimes we came to an understanding over Der Rosenkavalier or American folk songs, to both of which he introduced me. I was unaccustomed to alcohol and completely unaccustomed to late hours, and often the dawn was breaking over Dublin Bay when the pair of us staggered up to bed.

  I admired him enormously, but never became fond of him. I could not understand the sudden, extraordinary changes of mood, when the kind adviser turned into a mean, sardonic enemy, determined on making every word rankle. With Phibbs I could answer back, and our quarrels only resulted in a deeper friendship, but I stood too much in awe of Robinson to answer him back.

  I had admired his later work and produced it in Cork without realizing that a footnote like ‘If this play is produced in England read Birmingham instead of Cork’ was not really a Kafkaian generalization of the theme, but a desperate appeal for a London production. I had not learned then that in literature X never marks the spot.

  When I knew him first, Yeats had what I can only call a ‘crush’ on Lennox Robinson, whom he insisted on calling ‘Lennix’. One of Robinson’s ‘functional’ plays – ‘a table, two chairs and a passion’ as the author described it – had been slighted in England, and Yeats insisted on reviving it in Dublin, with a programme note by himself, trouncing the English critics. ‘Within five years Lennix will be a European figure,’ Yeats assured me with a wave of his hand, and I was glad to report the confidence to Robinson. I had not counted on the depth of despondency in him, because he merely looked away and said drearily, ‘He might as well have said five hundred.’ One morning, before we went to bed, we strolled down the garden to look at the first streaks of dawn on Dublin Bay, and Robinson said with his usual Regency emphasis: ‘One night I shall swim out into that, and swim and swim until I give up.’ It sounded to me like the whiskey, and unfortunately for himself it was the whiskey.

  My memory seems to have made a blank of all that conversation of his, sometimes silly, but often delightful. Even free whiskey doesn’t make bores tolerable, and Robinson had his own profundities. Once, when we had the usual argument about the early and late O’Casey, in which I must have been at fault, he suddenly burst out, ‘I don’t mind how many bad plays Sean writes for the rest of his life. Whatever they may be like, they will be the plays of a happy man.’ That stuck in my memory, not only because of its relevance to O’Casey – and it is very relevant to O’Casey – but because of its relevance to himself. It is the remark of a man who will never be happy again.

  Yeats was for ever probing me about him. He knew that I admired Robinson as he did, and felt that I was keeping from him things he should know. There was that dedication of a book to Iseult Gonne, which suggested an unhappy love affair, but by this time we both felt that Robinson was only pretending to be in love with Iseult because Yeats had been in love with her. ‘What is wrong with Lennix?’ he asked me point-blank one night and, remembering the conversation overlooking Dublin Bay in the dawn, I said, ‘Dissatisfaction with his work.’ Yeats looked at me shrewdly over his glasses and said, ‘I was afraid you were going to say dissatisfaction with something else.’ I think he knew what the something else was and, while resenting my refusal to confide in him, liked me just a little bit better for it. I felt that he thought for the most part that Catholics were not to be trusted, but on the odd occasion when we hit it off he began to develop a theory that I was really the illegitimate son of some Protestant big house.

  Meanwhile, the Abbey Theatre was going rapidly to the dogs. After the death of Lady Gregory, Yeats had allowed it to pass entirely into the control of Robinson. After her first experience of him as a young man Lady Gregory allowed him no control whatever, because she thought him irresponsible about money and morbid in his attitude to life. She made no bones about her dislike of him, and he would hardly have remained on as a director of the theatre if it had not been for Yeats. He took his revenge by editing her journals and choosing all the biting things she said of him for quotation to his friends. But that brilliant, moody, despondent man was a dead weight on the theatre. It wasn’t only that he drank himself, he encouraged the younger actors to drink with him. He not only approved of dreary farces, but when a fine play came in he would fasten on some fault and try to have the play rejected. As his own circumstances grew worse, he grew more and more obstructive.

  The theatre was heavily in debt. It was keeping open only on the strength of a group of favourite knockabout comedies by Robinson himself, Brinsley MacNamara and George Shiels; excellent comedies some of them, but all produced in the same slapdash hearty manner as though they were all written by the same author. If it had not been for the players – and there was hardly a weak actor in the group – the Abbey might not have survived. In Barry Fitzgerald (William Shields) it had a great comedian, in Maureen Delaney a great comedienne; F. J. McC
ormick and Eileen Crowe were two of the best actors I have ever seen. Any play that suited their genius did not even have to be completely written. They could do almost anything they pleased with a part. I once saw Fitzgerald set a scene of astounding bitterness in a comedy of Sheils and turn it into an uproarious farce. Usually the players directed themselves – sometimes they even selected the plays that were to be performed – and one got the impression of a garden gone wild, of every player grown so tall that it was all but impossible to tell what a play was really like. It was not the players’ fault. I have never forgotten one performance of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in which all the wild Connemara girls appeared in permanent waves.

  According to Robinson, the old plays had to be put on all the time because there were no new ones. I didn’t believe him, because in a theatre, as in a magazine, you get exactly what you look for. Theatre directors, like editors, must go out and find their writers, and W. B. Yeats was too old not to forage on his own. Yet, although he didn’t want to let Robinson down, Yeats was not happy with Robinson’s excuses. Once, when I was talking with Yeats about The Saint and Mary Kate, which I was writing at the time, he said wistfully, ‘I wish you would write that as a play for me.’ Had he been George Russell I probably would have tried to, for I realized a great editor like Russell would have handled the situation so differently. ‘My dear boy, that is a play, not a novel. Now the first date available is November 10th, which means that we have to start rehearsals not later than October 15th, so if you can let me have a script within the next month I can guarantee you a production.’

  And yet I am sure that Robinson was quite sincere. Though his inertia and indifference meant that his own harmless plays were kept permanently in the repertory, and though later I saw him try to ditch the work of better writers, either by faint praise or by criticism that smacked of dishonesty, I think his real weakness as a director was that he was himself in a state of despondency, and no despondent man can do work that requires endless improvisation. That was the ‘morbid’ streak in him of which Lady Gregory had been afraid. When Fred Higgins took his place as Yeats’ best friend, Robinson’s position became pitiable, and by 1935 Higgins had already achieved the first stage in his attempt to dislodge him.