An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  Finally, in a fit of exasperation, I said I would produce the play myself at my own expense. When I told Yeats, he turned on me with real anger, and I saw that under all the good-humoured detachment he was bitterly hurt at the rejection of his beautiful play by a group of nonentities. ‘And why did you not insist on its being produced when you had a majority of the Board behind you?’ he shouted. I didn’t know what to say, because the meeting had taken place some time before, and I could not immediately recall the details. I fobbed him off with Hayes’ threat of resignation and said we’d had too many resignations. It wasn’t until later that I remembered that nobody but Blythe had supported me, and that Higgins, Yeats’ friend, was not only one of the play’s bitterest opponents at the meeting, but was the person who had influenced Hayes by relating what Yeats was supposed to have said. All Yeats’ information came from Higgins, and I was the one who had been presented as having got cold feet. But I still thought the whole thing was a misunderstanding and wondered only if Yeats’ supposed blasphemies had not been a misunderstanding as well. I knew it was no use attacking his hero, Higgins, but I did ask him if he had interpreted the play in this way to anyone at any time. He looked at me in bewilderment and grew furious. ‘How could I have said anything so silly?’ he asked, which was exactly what I had wondered myself. I should have had sense enough to appeal directly to him at the beginning. He was quite right in his joke about me that I didn’t think the vast majority of people meant much harm to each other for the greater part of the time, but, all the same, he wasn’t too bright himself. Here were we, two grown men being put at cross purposes by schoolboy gossip and intrigue, and neither of us could see through it.

  If I had the talent of a comic novelist I should love to describe how that brilliant and delightful man put us all by the ears. Higgins didn’t even make a secret of it. He lived in what seemed to be an almost enchanted world of extemporization, imagination and intrigue. After his death, his old friends were approached for the manuscript of his last masterpiece, a play in which the characters were the picture cards in a pack. I knew that play better than I knew most of my own work. We had listened to it scene by scene and only waited to vote for its production; but, as each of us passed the buck, it became plain that that brilliant play never existed except in Higgins’ head.

  Yet Higgins was the man he had appointed director of his publishing firm and Managing Director of the Theatre. I had been Managing Director during the absence of the touring company and had asked Yeats how I should conduct myself. ‘I asked Lady Gregory exactly the same thing when I became Managing Director,’ he said, ‘and she told me, “Give very few orders but see that they are obeyed.”’ (Knowing her Yeats, the old lady knew that he wouldn’t recognize her advice as a quotation from Don Quixote.) Nominally Higgins’ appointment was for six months, to give us time to find a successor to Hunt. I knew perfectly well that there was no work for a full-time Managing Director, but Higgins entertained himself by doing Hunt’s job as well. ‘Giving very few orders’ was not much in the line of that excitable man. ‘My heavens,’ he wrote to me, ‘things are terrible here – all in a state of chassis. The BBC treated [threatened] to cancel broadcast because we could [couldn’t] give the cast Hunt offered – of which we knew nothing. However, had a visit from a BBC official and together we hammered out a suitable cast. Also Hunt never consulted Belfast Opera House re our plays for Belfast etc.’ (It is only fair to say that Higgins was ill. He had had an attack of Bell’s Palsy, which had blasted his handsome face and interfered with his speech, but left him as excitable and enthusiastic as ever.) I admit that the six months’ appointment never took me in, for I knew that an Irishman approaches a job in the spirit of the marriage service – ‘till death do us part’. But even I never guessed that not only had Higgins dug himself in for life, but that his successor would do the same, and that twenty years later the non-existent job would still be flourishing. ‘Vested interests’ indeed!

  I saw the theatre only at Board meetings, and I did not like the way things were going, with Hunt on the point of departure, and a new man, an Irish-speaking protégé of Blythe, taking over. But everything seemed to move with extraordinary rapidity towards one point – the death of Yeats. A day or two before he left for the South of France for the last time, he had a furious quarrel with Higgins. ‘W.B. has left in a difficult temper owing to a personal awkwardness,’ Higgins wrote to me. ‘Personal awkwardness’ was a mild description of Yeats’ discovery that Higgins had been playing fast and loose with him all over the shop. After this, Higgins refused to reply to his letters at all, and Yeats, knowing he had only a short time to live, dictated a letter to me. He asked that, if I agreed with him, I should telegraph him and he would take a plane home, dismiss the whole Board of directors, and start again with one chosen by ourselves. But I had no way of knowing how ill he really was, or whether his letter meant anything more than a fit of pique with Higgins, so I wrote him a soothing reply to tell him not to worry. I was in Chester at the time, and as I took my letter to the post I bought a Daily Telegraph and read of his death. (Years later, when two young writers had staged a public protest in the Abbey Theatre against its commercialism, I took a book from my shelves and out dropped my last letter to Yeats, unposted, stamped and sealed. I read it between tears, because it brought him back to me so vividly, and shame, to think I should have been such a fool.)

  That night I walked for a long time about the old walls of the city, saying over and over the lines from The Herne’s Egg that seem to me so much a better epitaph than the one he composed for himself. ‘Cast a cold eye/On life, on death’ is a caricature of Yeats, who was never cold; often angry, often stupid beyond belief, but always young in heart, passionate, involved:

  Strong sinew and soft flesh

  Are foliage round the shaft

  Before the arrowsmith

  Has stripped it, and I pray

  That I, all foliage gone,

  May shoot into my joy.

  21

  I had no idea that night what the death of Yeats would mean to me. In the long run it meant that I took a major decision, one which I have never regretted since, but my blindness at the time, both towards myself and the happenings at the Abbey, guaranteed that I would take the most painful road in changing the course of my life.

  I thought that night that I knew what I had lost in Yeats. Not a friend, but somebody who might have been a friend. During his last stay in Ireland his sister, Elizabeth, had asked me straight out, ‘Why don’t you go and see W.B.?’ She was a woman of great beauty, who had what in America would be recognized as the gift of calculated indiscretion – the sort of thing one associates with old American families. And as always when one has to deal with calculated indiscretion I dropped into uncalculated indiscretion and said, ‘Oh, I’d be afraid of boring him.’ ‘I don’t think so, you know,’ she said innocently, ‘because when you do call, he always talks about it. He’s very lonely, you know.’

  God help us, I did know it. I had known it from the moment George Yeats had sat down beside me at Gogarty’s party years before. I went to see Yeats and found him very depressed. He needed a holiday, he said, and I, greatly daring, asked, ‘Why don’t you come and stay with us? We could look after you very well.’ For a moment he didn’t know what to say, and then he gave me a boyish grin. ‘Old people stay with old friends,’ he replied. ‘They can be very trying to anybody else.’

  When a great man dies, not only does a legend spring up, but a phase of reality ends. Yeats himself realized it when he called one of his own autobiographical books Ireland after Parnell. Some day someone will write a book called ‘Ireland after Yeats’. The things that happen after the death of a man like that have already been happening before he dies, but because he is alive they seem of no great importance. Death suddenly reveals their importance by isolating them.

  For a year before his death little things had been happening which had depressed and irritated me. One evening I attended a Boar
d meeting at which the three other directors explained to me with chuckles that I need not read a play by a Minister’s wife because it would have to be accepted if we were to keep the Government grant. I didn’t know which angered me most, the insult to me, the insult to the Minister and his wife, or the insult to our audience, who relied on us to be incorruptible. On another occasion the theatre was running a competition for plays in Gaelic which Blythe was supervising and Mícheál MacLiammóir adjudicating. I learned by the merest accident that Sean O’Faolain had submitted a play. When I inquired what it was like, Blythe said, ‘Well, really, it wasn’t good enough to submit to the adjudicator,’ and this surprised me, because I did not think there was that much talent among writers in Irish. In the play which was shown to the judge and did win the prize, the principal characters were the Devil and the Blessed Virgin.

  Living in the country at Woodenbridge and involved in my own difficulties, it was impossible to be watchful enough. Higgins asked me not to bother reading Cecil Salkeld’s play about Germany, A Gay Goodnight. ‘A ridiculous play; the usual Anglo-Irish rubbish’ was how he described it. At the time I didn’t know that Higgins and Salkeld had quarrelled and that Salkeld was supposed to have hit Higgins in the theatre bar (somebody was always hitting Higgins). It wasn’t until years later, when I saw ‘the usual Anglo-Irish rubbish’ produced in a stable by a group of amateurs, that I realized Salkeld’s play was a little masterpiece.

  With Yeats permanently gone, I began now to realize that mediocrity was in control, and against mediocrity there is no challenge or appeal. Talent, like any other form of creative activity, has its own dialectic, and from its noisy and bitter conflicts some synthesis emerges, but mediocrity, having neither thesis nor antithesis, leads only a sort of biological life.

  But there was worse to come. One evening, after a Board meeting, Higgins asked me in a whisper to remain behind when the others had gone. He was in his usual state of conspiratorial exaltation, and I assumed he had unearthed another plot. He had. When we were by ourselves he opened the minute book and pointed to a resolution that had been proposed by Hayes and passed. At this time I was editing a re-issue of Yeats’ old theatre magazine, the Arrow; the resolution required me to submit everything I wrote in it to Lennox Robinson for his approval. A short time before, Hayes himself had moved the resolution demanding the dismissal of Robinson from the Board, and Yeats had replied, ‘Everybody on this Board realizes that Lennix Robinson is no longer responsible for his actions.’ He was now being made responsible for mine, and, being Robinson, probably saw nothing in the least inappropriate about it. Suddenly the door of the boardroom opened and Hayes was standing there. ‘I’m waiting to walk home with you, Michael,’ he said plaintively. I could barely speak and said without looking at him that I had some work to do. By this time he realized what Higgins had shown me. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said in a hurt voice and left. ‘And now let me tell you something else,’ Higgins said triumphantly. ‘You asked why the Board did not give Tanya Moiseiwitsch a dinner before she left. We did, but Blythe insisted that you should not be asked. Here’s the report of the dinner, if you don’t believe me.’

  I left the theatre in a frenzy. I felt that as a result of the death of Yeats I was left alone with a group of men not one of whom I should trust. Hayes’ treachery was the thing that mattered most to me because for years he had been my closest friend. A critic of the theatre has described him as an arch-intriguer, though I did not find him so, and his machinations struck me as those of a very innocent and disinterested man. I think that, like many of his generation, he had adopted an idealistic pose too lofty for his own simple character, and that something – something perhaps in me that he couldn’t understand – had caused it to break down. Years later, when Higgins was already dead, I was standing at the desk in the National Library when I suddenly felt an arm about my shoulders and heard Hayes say, ‘My dear Michael, won’t you shake hands with me?’ It was one of the few occasions in my life when I shrank away from a man. Remembering the years of good fellowship and kindness, it is something I try to regret, but with little success, for it was more than Hayes I was turning my back on.

  What I did regret in 1939 was leaving the theatre of Yeats, and Synge and Lady Gregory, and the end of their dream of a national theatre that would perpetuate their work. The alternative for me was to remain on and fight the Board, not on the terms of the founders, but on the terms of the current members. But there would be no Yeats to whom the members would ultimately have to defend themselves. Genius is often a light by which we occasionally see ourselves and so refrain from some commonness of thought or action that the time allows. I knew then, as I know now, that this kind of infighting and intrigue was something I could not carry on alone. Their terms were those of the Nationalist-Catholic establishment – Christmas pantomimes in Gaelic guying the ancient sagas that Yeats had restored, and enlivened with Blythe’s Gaelic versions of popular songs and vulgar farces. One by one they lost their great actors and replaced them with Irish speakers; one by one, as the members of the Board died or resigned, they replaced these with civil servants and lesser Party politicians.

  A great man is one who acts and speaks from a vision of himself. It is not that he is always right and everyone else wrong – often it is the other way round – but that even when he is wrong he is speaking from ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’, the central volcano from which all creation comes. In so far as he interprets his country, as Yeats interpreted Ireland, he has no other source of authority. Once when we were arguing about politics, Yeats quoted a remark of de Valera’s of which his enemies were making great capital – ‘When I want to know what Ireland thinks, I look into my own heart.’ ‘Where else could he look?’ growled Yeats.

  But it takes a large heart to hold even a small country, and since Yeats’ death there has been no other that could hold us, with all our follies and heroism.

  Years before, he had asked me suddenly one night, ‘O’Connor, do you believe you can transmit genius?’ I was taken by surprise and did not realize until later that it was his own children he had been worrying about, so I replied, ‘Genius? Hardly genius! Talent one can certainly transmit. The Bachs are a good example.’ Then I realized that in my usual manner I had said something to make him cross, and he sulked at me for a few minutes. Finally he snorted, ‘An old aunt of mine used to say’ – the standard beginning for a crushing retort – ‘you can transmit anything you like provided you take care not to marry the girl next door.’

  It was in war-time England some time later that I came to realize the full significance for me of Yeats’ death and my resignation from the Abbey. I was staying with Leonard and Sylvia Strong and had a dream one night which a psychiatrist friend of theirs sought to interpret for me. Suddenly I knew perfectly well what the dream meant and that it was a warning never again to allow the man of action in me to get on top. There was more wisdom in Harold Macmillan’s advice than I had thought. Before Yeats died he told me that the time had come to decide whether I wanted to be a good public official, and I had resigned my job as librarian. Now I saw that the man of action was still on top; with nothing like Yeats’ talent I had been playing Yeats’ game. At once I resigned from every organization I belonged to and sat down, at last, to write.

  * When I was growing up, ‘O’Donovan’ and ‘Donovan’ were almost interchangeable. English officials insisted on the latter form, and it was always used familiarly.

  *See An Only Child, chapter 14.

  *Robinson’s assistant. He later became Director of the National Gallery, Dublin.

  *‘Guests of the Nation’.