Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  Yet he was no stern ascetic; he drank and smoked and enjoyed golf and bridge. Amongst his few friends he was excellent company, witty, well informed and frequently irreverent with an inimitable caustic flippancy that would not have amused the average bishop (and 99 per cent of Irish bishops are dreadfully average). He read widely and wrote (anonymously) with considerable force and skill. Unlike most Irish people he thought naturally in international terms; and unlike most Irish priests he was neither scornful nor suspicious of the great non-European religions.

  The only vice despised by Mark was what he called ‘humbug’. Hypocrisy in any form he recognised at a glance and witheringly condemned. Otherwise, he was prepared to find endless excuses for human frailty; if he had had to choose a motto it would have been ‘Judge not …’ There was nothing lax or confused about his own standards – these were austerely high and uncompromisingly clear-cut – but his compassion was without limit. That virtue should be common enough among practising Christians, yet it is not. Too many of them are too sure that only their precise interpretation of God’s law has any validity. They see themselves as being on the right side of the fence, from where they may benevolently extend forgiveness or pity or help to wrong-doers on the other side without ever showing true compassion – a word that implies ‘fellow-feeling’. For Mark, however, there was no fence. And when I became familiar with Tibetan Buddhism I realised that the quality of his compassion was more Eastern than Western.

  Mark and I were aged, respectively, thirty-two and five when our friendship was established – or, it may be, re-established. Yet it was from the beginning, in a very strange way, a friendship between equals. Of course I looked to Mark for advice – and even occasionally accepted it from him – and for the support and guidance and stability on older person could provide. But the essential nature of our relationship was not what might have been expected, given the disparity in our ages.

  It is fashionable to take unusual relationships to bits, as though they were engines, and to explain and label their component parts. For instance – was Mark, to me, a father-figure, a man who made possible the sort of relationship I could not have with my own father? Or was he a hero to be worshipped because he was so kind and funny and cared so little for convention? Or was he a beloved guru, a priest whose concept of religion coincided, on the most fundamental issues, with my own? Was I, to him, a daughter-substitute? Or, later, a woman who might have become his mistress in any but an Irish context? Or, later still, a fascinating link with the wide world that was his natural habitat but from which he was isolated?

  What does any of that matter? Maybe some or all of these elements formed strands in our bond, but the mysterious essence of such a rare friendship eludes analysis and makes nonsense of the trite ‘father-figure’ and ‘daughter-substitute’ labels. It matters only that for thirty-three years Mark stood steadfast at the centre of my emotional life while around the edges raged all the storms whipped up by passion, frustration, loyalty, loneliness, doubt, guilt and faithlessness. Francis Bacon can say the rest – ‘A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fullness of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce … No receipt openeth the heart but a true friend, to whom you may impart whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in kind of civil shrift or confession … The second fruit of friendship is healthful and sovereign for the understanding, as the first is for the affections; for friendships maketh indeed a fair day in the affection from storm and tempests, but it maketh daylight in the understanding, out of darkness and confusion of thoughts; neither is to be understood only of faithful counsel, which a man receiveth from his friend; but before you come to that, certain it is, that whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up, in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour’s discourse than by a day’s meditation.’

  12

  My adolescent memories are of abrupt changes in outlook and unpredictable moods which must have made me more than usually trying; yet nobody seems to have regarded these developments as ‘a problem’. Somehow my parents made me feel that certain of their standards were as immutable as the laws of nature and could never be abandoned without shame. But they always clearly differentiated between standards and opinions – or tastes. One had to tell the truth, pay bills promptly, consider servants (if any), avoid harmful gossip, respect confidences and remember that politeness has to do primarily with other people’s feelings. However, should one chance, by some lamentable disorientation of the sensibilities, to prefer Mendelssohn to Bach, or Rupert Brooke to Milton, that was nobody’s business or misfortune but one’s own. This allowed ample scope for scorn and revolution, without any threat to law and order, and for many of the parental preferences I cultivated, at various stages, a vehement though seldom lasting contempt.

  Perhaps the extent to which today’s teenagers baffle me is partly a result of the abnormal circumstances of my own adolescence. Despite having adult responsibilities, my material dependence on my parents remained total and seemed unlikely to lessen in the foreseeable future. By the standards of most modern youngsters my activities were pathetically circumscribed, and to outsiders – like the Dublin Murphys – my whole way of life looked uneventful and dull to a degree.

  Yet it was nothing of the sort. Were I asked to pin-point the most exciting period of a life that latterly has been more eventful than most, I would say – ‘The years from fourteen to seventeen’. But I must be careful here. How much do we romanticise youth and hope and energy, so that only their glory is remembered? Perhaps all I should say is that in retrospect those years seem to have contained much happiness and little unhappiness, despite a constant underlying irritation at having to waste so much time every day on tedious domestic chores. And despite occasional brief – but intense – moods of depression caused by personality clashes with my mother.

  Yet ‘happiness’ is not the right word; it implies a lack of complications and a tranquillity which are uncharacteristic of adolescence. Elation would be more accurate, the elation of discovering literature and music, combined with the sheer animal pleasure of being young and healthy and very vigorous. Adolescence is supremely a time of discovery. To me Shakespeare represented not an aspect of the examination tyrant but a stimulating expanse of beauty. And music was a shared joy which drew the three of us very close, in a sort of truce-atmosphere, even when parent-child relations were at their worst. Then there was the natural beauty of West Waterford. At any season a walk or a cycle aroused almost unbearable delight. Apparently I was missing a lot; yet I desired, during those years, no more than I had.

  For three months after leaving school I was unwontedly abstemious and wrote nothing; the long-drawn-out family quarrel was unnerving me more than I realised. Then an idea for a boys’ adventure story came to me and I began to write frenziedly, sitting up in bed until the small hours, covering sheet after sheet of foolscap. And I discovered that my approach to writing had changed. No longer was I satisfied with verbal bulk and a hair’s-breadth escape per paragraph. The hero of that story became to me a real person, instead of remaining an inhumanly tough yet sentimentally gallant Biggles/Bulldog Drummond hybrid. He still had ‘keen fearless grey eyes and a firm mouth’ (I quote from the typescript, recently accidentally disinterred), but his speech was credible though he retained an unfortunate tendency to strangle people with one swift movement. More important, however, was the fact that I now began to rewrite, and to find pleasure in seeing sentences improve, even if I had had to sacrifice three words of six syllables each to achieve that improvement. There is a control of language, a sense of rhythm, an intimation of style in that story – though I wrote and rewrote all 43,000 words of it in exactly three weeks.

  Not until it was finished did I think of secretly
sending it to a publisher – secretly because I wished to avoid parental sympathy when it was rejected. I felt very adult and earnest as I withdrew all my meagre savings from the post office, looked up the address of a suitable typist on the last but one page of the TLS and took down a list of possible publishers from The Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book in my father’s office. I was now actively engaged in the literary world, not just daydreaming about it. The most I really hoped for were some constructive words of advice to a fourteen-year-old from kindly publishers’ editors. And that is exactly what I got. I cannot remember how often that typescript was posted to England – at least half-a-dozen times – but it never came home without a positively encouraging letter accompanying the rejection slip. These letters at least confirmed that my ambition was not built on self-delusion. The literary world had taken me seriously enough to urge me on; and that, for the moment, satisfied me. I had never visualised myself as an adolescent prodigy and I came of a breed used to taking rejection slips – as it were – on the chin.

  Nietzsche may have proclaimed ‘the death of God’ a century ago, but it took time for the news to spread and in my generation most Europeans grew up under the influence of firmly held religious beliefs, not necessarily orthodox, but involving an adherence to moral standards based on Christian ethics. Thus we are unique, for our adult world became a place where, as John Wren-Lewis has put it, ‘for the first time in human history, the general climate of educated opinion has lost the religious assumptions that have hitherto been almost universal’. So we are in a position to enjoy the best of both worlds. From the old world we have inherited, if we wish to claim the legacy, a certain stability; we have something specific to move away from – and to refer back to, albeit selectively, in moments of crisis. Of course a traditional religious upbringing can also lead to innumerable irrational conflicts such as our juniors, who were ‘born free’, will never have to resolve. But I still feel that we are a fortunate group.

  Yet for many the loss of ‘religious assumptions’ has – only too obviously – been demoralising and frightening. Even to consider such a loss impersonally could frighten people like my parents whose own faith was, apparently, impregnable. I remember, when I was seventeen, hearing my father gloomily quoting to my mother a prediction from Belloc – ‘What I think will spring out of the new filth is a new religion. I think that there will arise in whatever parts of Christendom remain, say, 200 years hence … a new religion, because human society cannot live on air … This conception of a new religion (and, therefore, an evil one) fantastic and unpleasant. Unpleasant I admit it is; fantastic I do not believe it to be.’ My parents of course shared Belloc’s view, but by then I found the notion of a new religion exhilarating.

  About two years previously, however, I too would have agreed with Belloc. I had then gone through a phase of intense orthodox fervour which was altogether inconsistent with my general attitude towards religion, either before or since. This, I believe, is a common adolescent stage; and in Ireland, even today, a disquieting number of people seem to develop no further. Suddenly I began to enjoy going to church – for me a hitherto rather boring routine accepted only because it was so rigorously prescribed by one’s home, school and social environment. No longer content with Sunday Mass, I now went to the convent chapel every morning at seven-thirty; and if there was an evening service (known as ‘devotions’) I went to that too; and I rejoiced on the first Friday of each month because then the service lasted for an hour instead of half-an-hour. I also went to confession once a week though I cannot recall committing any notable sins during this period. Emotionally I seemed to need the various rituals and to thrive, most improbably, on Irish Catholicism’s unwholesome mush of sentimentality and superstition. But it was also important to feel that through personal prayer I was in direct touch with Christ. (The Father and the Holy Ghost introduced unnecessary complications so I left them out of it.) Had I ‘got religion’ a decade later, that would have been understandable enough. But by the time ritual and prayer might have served as an escape or a comfort they had ceased to have meaning for me.

  My fervour lasted a year or so and then quite quickly evaporated. Meanwhile I had begun to read a little about other religions, an interest kindled by my pen-friendship with a Sikh girl. Mahn Kaur was four years my senior and lived in Kuala Lumpur, where her family had settled before she was born. Her enquiring mind and lucid, indefatigable pen did a great deal for me. Having been educated by Irish nuns, she wanted to find out as much as she could about Ireland and Europe and the various Christian Churches. In return, she told me about the Sikh religion, which inevitably made me curious about Islam and Hinduism, which eventually led on to Buddhism.

  Mahn Kaur was naturally much concerned about contemporary events in India. We had begun our correspondence in September 1946, when Mark noticed a letter from Mahn Kaur in a Catholic newspaper appealing for a pen-friend ‘interested in history and religion’. And this personal link with the subcontinent, slight though it was, made me feel deeply involved, emotionally, in the terrible events of 1947. These were not just another distant disaster reported in the newspapers. All Mahn Kaur’s relatives lived in the Punjab.

  For four or five years we wrote to each other at least once a fortnight. This correspondence, and the ripples it spread, became one of my main interests. Mahn Kaur was my only contact with an inaccessible world which I longed to experience for myself and it consoled me to feel that Fate was indirectly catering for this longing. More important, the reading she stimulated heightened my inborn awareness that all the religions of mankind are equally valid. As some modern Hindus express it, they are all fingers pointing at the moon. And it is the moon that matters. My parents would have condemned this attitude as the vague evasiveness of a lazy thinker. But to me it was the truth and having seen it I could not worry about my own religious label – or the lack of one. If certain individuals felt that they did not belong, naturally, to any religious group, what did it matter? The moon was there anyway. And worship or contemplation does not have to be restricted to churches or monasteries.

  I remember one very cold January morning standing in the kitchen by the turf-range (a wartime innovation) while eagerly opening a letter from Malaya. As I slit the envelope I saw, just for an instant, the closeness of my mental relationship with Mahn Kaur as a measure of my closeness to Asia; and our whole correspondence seemed very much a preparation. Those rare moments when we apparently get a signal from the future do not effect the conduct of one’s daily life. But they have their value below the level on which one feels impatient or thwarted – or even hopeless.

  A few weeks later came Gandhi’s assassination. I was in bed with tonsillitis and I shall never forget switching on the wireless to hear that news. During those years I was mesmerised by the writings of Gandhi and I regarded him with a rapture which has since been considerably modified. Shakespeare, another adolescent obsession, has worn better. At school I had detested The Merchant of Venice, not being yet ready for Elizabethan English. (How many thirteen-year-olds are thus given an enduring distaste for great literature?) But three years later I was ‘saved’ when Anew McMaster’s famous touring company came to Lismore. They played Hamlet in a huge draughty building known as the Hippodrome, which soon after fell down of its own volition. The place was packed to the door – as it would never be now, with a television set in 95 per cent of Irish homes. Most of the townsfolk were there and, tethered along the sides of the road, in both directions, stood the horses, ponies, jennets and donkeys who had provided transport for Shakespeare’s rural fans. The response was tremendous at the end of every scene; in several places the floor boards collapsed beneath the hob-nailed boots of enthusiastic farm lads. It is sometimes argued that television has a unifying effect on a nation or a community because so many people watch the same programmes. But that is a very spurious unity compared to the delighted converging on the Hippodrome of most of Lismore.

  I had never read Hamlet – or any Shakespear
e, after my delivery from The Merchant of Venice – and presumably neither had the majority around me. Yet we were completely carried away by that performance. At the end I emerged in a fever of delight, feeling very disinclined to go home to bed. It was a wild October night. Clouds were flying before a south wind so that the full moon seemed herself in flight. Possibly that moon had something to do with my mood. I cycled up to the Vee – ten miles above Lismore – and looking down onto the silvered plain of Tipperary felt a passion of gratitude, directed towards no one in particular, because I had been born. I got home at five-fifteen – not realising, then, how lucky I was to have parents who registered no alarm at breakfast-time when their sixteen-year-old daughter explained that she had been out all night. Both regarded cycling to the Vee by moonlight as a perfectly natural reaction to one’s first Hamlet.

  Within a year of that initiation ceremony, I was not only reading and enjoying Shakespeare but studying him, seriously. All my pocket-money was being spent on esoteric volumes of Shakespeariana which my father refused to buy for the public library because they would only have a readership of one. By this time a spare room had been converted into my study, with bookshelves around two walls from floor to ceiling. It occurred to me now that I might after all have taken to university life; but I wasted no time on regrets. In my private Shakespearian studies I was at least free to please myself while flexing whatever rudimentary scholarly muscles were then demanding exercise. I had never before concentrated on anything other than writing stories. Now, though my studies sometimes became tedious, I would not allow their tedium to deter me. While writing several learned (as I supposed) essays on various Shakespearian controversies, I discovered how essential self-discipline is in any activity of this sort. It was all great fun – very much the sort of thing to which Pappa had devoted half a lifetime, though I did not then see this – and it gratified me to find that I was capable of becoming slightly knowledgeable about something.