by Mervyn Wall
MERVYN WALL
The Return of Fursey
with an introduction by
MICHAEL DIRDA
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Dedication: To Ria Mooney, my good friend these many years
The Return of Fursey by Mervyn Wall
First published by The Pilot Press, London, in 1948
First Valancourt Books edition 2017
Copyright © 1948 by Mervyn Wall
Introduction copyright © 2015 by Michael Dirda
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
Cover by Stephanie Hofmann
INTRODUCTION
Learned books have been written about “the Irish comic tradition”, which ranges from the tales of Finn MacCool and Brian Merriman’s ribald The Midnight Court, to the classic plays of Shaw, Wilde, Synge, and O’Casey, to Joyce’s rumbustious Ulysses, Flann O’Brien’s head-spinning At Swim–Two-Birds and the desolate comedies of Samuel Beckett. To this distinguished Gaelic company belong Mervyn Wall’s two novels about the misadventures of an ex-monk and inadvertent wizard, the ever hopeful and usually hapless Fursey.
Fursey’s misadventures began in The Unfortunate Fursey, available from Valancourt Books as a companion volume to this one. While you should certainly read that earlier book before starting The Return of Fursey, a quick précis of the story so far is hardly out of place, if only to reintroduce our hero.
Back in late tenth-century Ireland Satan and his forces mounted a determined siege on the monastery of Clonmacnoise. To thwart this onslaught of demons and succubi the brothers were compelled to exile a rather simple-minded monk named Fursey, in part because the Devil had taken a shine to him. Unhappily out in the world, Fursey rapidly encountered witches, corrupt clergymen, a lecherous king, sexy elementals, a holy anchorite, Joe the poltergeist and various representative citizens of medieval Ireland. Having admitted to intercourse—social not sexual—with demons, the unfortunate Fursey was righteously sentenced to immolation at the stake. In the end, this apprentice sorcerer escaped his punishment by flying off on a broomstick, hoping to start a new life in Britain.
The Return of Fursey opens three months later. Wall’s mock Augustan prose is even more coolly ironic than before:
“It is not generally known that the first Letters of Extradition issued in Western Europe were those addressed to the court of Mercia by Cormac Silkenbeard, King of Cashel; and they related to the notorious sorcerer Fursey, recently fled across the Western Sea to Britain. They set out in elegant Latin his manifold crimes and villainies, and politely requested that he be returned to Ireland for judicial burning.”
As it happens, Ethelwulf, the king of Mercia, is a monarch of volatile temper and battle-hardened ways. He hesitates to comply with the extradition request. The Abbot Marcus patiently explains that “Fursey surrendered himself to the authorities of the Kingdom of Cashel, and made a full confession of his affliction, asserting that he had become a sorcerer by accident; but no sooner did we inform him of our charitable intention of securing the safety of his immortal soul by burning him on a pyre, than he began to behave in a manner altogether at variance with his known character for gentleness and humility. He immediately proceeded astride a broom to the roof of the Bishop’s Palace and set flame to the thatch with such thoroughness as to gut completely that valuable and desirable residence. Not content with having wrought this great mischief and evil, he swooped on a neighboring church, interrupted a marriage ceremony, disabled the bridegroom by a sudden kick in the stomach, and carried off the bride to the great distress of her friends and relations.”
After some reflection, Ethelwulf agrees that the jilted Magnus—who has accompanied Abbot Marcus on this mission—may retrieve his runaway bride, if she wishes to return to him. But no one is to touch Fursey. The shrewd king of Mercia recognises that a good sorcerer could be of considerable assistance in his upcoming military ventures.
Meanwhile, Fursey has become a quiet and well-fed provincial storekeeper. By using his magic rope, he can readily produce whatever foodstuffs or delicacies his customers desire. Though Fursey’s domestic life with Maeve has remained properly chaste, she has nonetheless assumed an increasingly wifely, even shrewish, manner. “He had learnt during the two months he had lived with Maeve that a woman fussed by her household duties is a different sort of creature altogether from the girl one remembered standing beside a lake with the wind blowing through her hair.”
That passage already hints at the prevalent tone in this second Fursey novel: disenchantment. In The Unfortunate Fursey high spirits and picaresque adventure predominated; here, Wall—without losing his sense of comedy—emphasises the shattering of illusions, the undercutting of romantic dreams by quotidian reality. When we first see Fursey again he is sitting under a tree, Buddha-like, reflecting on the nature of human happiness. As the novel progresses, he will again set out on the open road, but the sunniness of the first book will now be tinged with an autumnal melancholy.
After Maeve is persuaded to return to the soldierly Magnus, the distraught Fursey immediately forgets the domestic spats of the past months. Suddenly, unexpectedly lost to him, Maeve once more becomes his idealised beloved without whom life seems meaningless. To destroy Magnus and win back the woman of his dreams, Fursey—who has never actually done anything sinful in his life—now resolves to serve the dark side, to become “a most depraved character”. As he operatically declares, “I’ll turn wicked.”
So, shivering with fear, he makes a Dantesque journey through a haunted wood to summon up his old chum, the Devil. Yet when a rather broken-down figure appears, Fursey is taken aback. The poor fellow has clearly fallen on evil days:
“On the couple of occasions on which the Enemy of Mankind had previously appeared to him, seeking to purchase his immortal soul, Satan had manifested himself as a suave, debonair personage, dressed in the latest fashion and irradiating good fellowship and bonhomie. Fursey recognized the lineaments of the Prince of Darkness, but it was with difficulty; for the dark-complexioned fiend presented the appearance of a very decayed gentleman indeed. His countenance seemed tarnished with malignant vapours and his black cloak was singed and smelt abominably of brimstone. In fact, the Archfiend was a hideous piece of wreckage, very rickety as to his legs, and generally very much in need of repair. Fursey gazed at him in amazement. A melancholy smile played about the Devil’s aristocratic features; then he emitted a sigh that seemed laden with all the heartbreak of history.”
I’ll say no more: Readers should discover on their own why and how Satan has managed to lose his customary suavity and self-assurance.
While The Return of Fursey—like the second part of Don Quixote—presents a litany of repeated disappointment, Wall nonetheless keeps matters consistently amusing. When Fursey agrees to lead a ship of Viking marauders to Clonmacnoise, he grows friendly with one-eyed Snorro. On the night before the raid, Snorro explains that the crew members usually take the omens, which involves “the examination of entrails for the purposes of divination.” But their chief has decided to temporarily put off this ritual.
“ ‘I don’t understand,’ said Fursey. ‘I’m sure it’s an interesting ceremony, but I don’t mind missing it.’
“ ‘You won’t miss it,’ said Snorro patiently. ‘It’s your
intestines that are to be consulted.’
“ ‘My intestines!’ ejaculated Fursey. ‘But will I survive the ceremony?’
“ ‘I never heard of anyone that did,’ replied Snorro gloomily.”
Later, this odd couple look out from a hidden vantage point at the monks they are about to attack: “Are they happy?” Snorro asks. To which Fursey answers, and you can almost hear the sigh, “Ah, who is happy?”
This stoic resignation—very much in the key of Beckett—runs throughout these pages, as our hero learns that all hopes are soon dashed, all dreams only mirages. The satire, too, has grown harsher. The Unfortunate Fursey ended with the Devil making a cleverly diabolical arrangement with the clergy of Ireland. Here, a censor visits Clonmacnoise and—before the eyes of its Librarian—incinerates all the monastery’s most precious manuscripts, including “four copies of the Old Testament, which he had denounced as being in its general tendency indecent.” The censor represents the worst sort of modern bureaucrat:
“ ‘What some of you people don’t realise,’ he explained to the mournful Librarian, ‘is that in this country we don’t want men of speculative genius or men of bold and enquiring mind. We must establish the rule of Aristotle’s golden mean. We must rear a race of mediocrities, who will be neither a danger to themselves nor to anyone else.’ ”
Given such bitter, even Swiftian touches in The Return of Fursey, there’s little wonder that Wall’s later novels, starting with Leaves for the Burning (1952), deepen his repudiation of Ireland’s narrow-minded orthodoxies.
If being a Viking wasn’t dangerous enough, Fursey soon encounters a cinematically spooky vampire. The weary ex-monk is marching along at midnight when “he turned a corner and came to a stretch of vacant road along which the trees were spaced like soldiers. He experienced a sudden fright as he saw a few yards from him a raven perched on a gatepost. It cocked its glossy head and looked at him wickedly. Fursey passed by trembling and entered the avenue of trees. The shadows lay in grey bars across the road. He became conscious of a fluttering movement in the air above him. He stopped and glanced up. Innumerable bats were fluttering up and down between the trees. As Fursey watched, one of them, larger than the others, fluttered down and, alighting on the road ten paces ahead of him, resolved itself into a gentleman wrapped in a black cloak.”
Vampires, or at least vampires like George (for that is his name), are not usual in Celtic folklore, which is one reason why some stringent critics faulted Wall for employing European, rather than Irish, supernatural beliefs. Such purism seems out of place, especially given George’s charm and Wall’s own insouciance. As the author once explained:
“I brought vampires into The Return of Fursey, if you remember, and, really, why I don’t know. They just came into my head, that’s all. There was no solid reason behind it. You see, they’re not even believed in in these Western countries at all. So it just came into my head and I shoved it down. I wasn’t very responsible in these matters.”
George and Fursey enter into an uneasy friendship as they walk along, discussing the loneliness that besets them both. Before they part, George sounds once again the minor chords of romantic melancholy. “Turns in the road are attractive . . . because one can never be quite certain of what one may encounter round the bend. Of course, in point of fact, there is never anything round the bend; but when a man ceases to believe that there may be, it is time for him to die.”
Fursey continues on his way, determined to reach a mountain fastness inhabited by witches and diabolists. En route, he passes some of the “pillarstones” of ancient pagan belief, gloomily remarking that “wherever there was strong religious conviction there was blood-letting and oppression.” Increasingly, the satire of The Unfortunate Fursey has begun to morph into something approaching misanthropy. At one point Fursey even declares, “If only man were absent . . . how beautiful the world would be.”
While in residence at this witches’ hideout (in some ways, a mirror image of his old monastery), Fursey tries to persuade the sorcerer Cuthbert—another carryover from his earlier adventures—to create a poison that will destroy Magnus and a philtre that will win back Maeve’s affections. Yet Fursey’s moonings over his lost love, Wall suggests, are just as absurd as the amorous mooings of an infatuated cow that has become fixated on the apprentice sorcerer. In the end, after resisting an impulse to commit suicide, Fursey pulls himself together and resolutely presents himself at the small farmhouse where Magnus and Maeve live. More surprises await.
Critic Darrell Schweitzer has observed that the Fursey books, especially this one, “become deeply moving as they unfold . . . Scenes of merriment give way to tears. Wall’s technique is one of using comedy to approach subject matter so bleak that it would be unbearably depressing if handled any other way. Life is so painful, these books tell us, so terribly futile, that all one can do is laugh at it while one can. It is a difficult balancing act. The two novels seem all the more robust and emotionally wrenching for their slapstick. On the surface, they sparkle, but they are dark at heart.”
Yet, let me stress, they do sparkle. Wall once wrote, “it was words I was interested in always—words; just like a painter’s interested in the pigment. It’s not a matter of what happens, but to use words as they’ve never been used before is what’s important, it seems to me.” Given such an aesthetic, Wall was always a slow writer, as meticulous as Flaubert: “I have to weigh every word, sound and everything.” Sometimes, working from nine till midnight, he would compose a single paragraph and “the following day I’d come along and I’d correct that paragraph, because I wanted every sentence to be perfect.”
Those efforts paid off. Both Fursey novels are, as Brian Stableford rightly remarks, “beautifully polished comedy”. They also belong to that rare class of books that one can reread periodically with unalloyed pleasure. Brother Fursey’s expulsion into the world may have been a sore trial for him, but it was—O, felix culpa—a fortunate fall for lucky readers. Fursey forever!
Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda, a longtime reviewer for the Washington Post, is the author of the 2012 Edgar Award-winning On Conan Doyle. His other books include the memoir An Open Book and several collections of essays, including Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, Classics for Pleasure and Browsings. In 1993 Dirda received the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. He is currently at work on a book about late 19th and early 20th-century popular fiction, tentatively titled The Great Age of Storytelling.
CHAPTER I
It is not generally known that the first Letters of Extradition issued in Western Europe were those addressed to the court of Mercia by Cormac Silkenbeard, King of Cashel; and that they related to the notorious sorcerer Fursey, recently fled across the Western Sea to Britain. They set out in elegant Latin his manifold crimes and villainies, and politely requested that he be returned to Ireland for judicial burning. The Civil Service of Mercia was a small, bald-headed man, whose administrative cares increased yearly as his warlike master pushed conquest further and further into the neighbouring territories, but the Civil Service of Mercia was tenacious, and after three weeks’ study came to a full understanding of the document and of its implications. He appointed a day for the reception of the Irish delegation and carefully coached the King of Mercia in what was expected of him.
Ethelwulf was a gloomy, big-boned warrior, at home only in the saddle. He had begun to realise the drawbacks of conquest. It was very pleasant to overrun and annex territories during the summer months, but during the autumn and winter you had to settle down and give your time and energies to arranging for their administration; and this work he found in the highest degree tedious. Other things, too, contributed to the steady decay of his temper. He was blessed with a wife shapely of body and gracious of address, but her extravagance was past all belief. To keep her clothed in the latest Byzantine fashion cost more than would maintain an army of the hardiest warriors. And on the day on which he received the Irish delegation,
he had even more than usual cause for moroseness and gloom. His only son, on whom were based the hopes of the dynasty, had but a few days previously disgraced himself by eloping with a molecatcher’s daughter. The molecatcher had been immediately seized and hanged, but this act of tardy justice had afforded but little solace to the afflicted father. So it was with a brow of more than usual sternness that Ethelwulf entered his Hall of Audience on the day appointed.
On his entry the assembly of nobles and warriors rose to its feet as a mark of respect to their sovereign, and a flock of long-haired harpers in a corner struck up a welcoming tune. Ethelwulf stalked across the hall, mounted the dais and seated himself gingerly on his carbuncle-studded throne. When the company had once more resumed their seats, the Civil Service cleared his throat and began to read the day’s manifestos and proclamations prior to passing them up to the monarch so that the royal mark might be made at the bottom of each.
During these preliminaries Ethelwulf rested his black chin on his fist and gazed gloomily along the rows of forked beards that filled the hall. How he hated the silks and effeminate trappings of peace! How ridiculous they looked, those fierce swordsmen of his, dolled up in coloured cloaks and ribbons! His eyes travelled the length of the hall and came at last to rest on a little group of strangers near the door. His face brightened with a momentary gladness as he bent his gaze upon the group of tall, fierce-looking men with lank locks tucked into their belts—the Norse traders. They had come a few days before and from their long dragonship in the harbour had discharged a cargo of salted hogs. The king smiled slightly. They were no traders. He noted the twitching fingers on the pommels of the great swords, the scars, the broken noses and the places where ears had been lopped off. Those were not accidents that befell simple traders on board ship. Unless he was very much mistaken they were men after his own heart, Viking raiders, some of the few who had so far escaped Christianising. He wondered what they had in mind. The cargo of salted hogs was obviously a blind. It paid their expenses, of course, and brought them thus far into the Western Sea. Doubtlessly they would slip away some night without a return cargo, but with an empty dragonship to cruise along the coasts with irregular and villainous purpose. Despite the Viking raids of the previous centuries there must still be many a fat Irish monastery worthy of their attention. Hardy warriors, he told himself. He could use such men in the coming spring, when he planned to burst like a hurricane into the kingdom of Strathclyde.