I seemed to hear the doorbell ring and the maid’s step on the stairs.
‘Mr James Joyce to see you, sir.’
From MY FATHER’S SON – GEORGE RUSSELL AND W. B. YEATS
GEORGE RUSSELL, the Editor of the Irish Statesman, did his editing from an attic room in a Georgian house in Merrion Square, which he had papered in brown wrapping-paper and decorated with gods and goddesses in dark browns and gold. He sat behind a large desk to the side of the fireplace – a big, burly north of Ireland Presbyterian with wild hair and beard and a pipe hanging from his discoloured teeth. He usually sat well back in his chair, beaming benevolently through his spectacles, his legs crossed, and his socks hanging down over his ankles. Sometimes in an earnest mood he leaned forward with his two fat hands on his knees, his head lowered as he looked at you over the specs, giving his appearance almost an elfin quality. He was an extraordinarily restless, fidgety man, forever jumping up to find some poem he was about to print (usually lost in the heap of papers, prints, and manuscripts in his desk) or some book he was reviewing. With him was his secretary, Susan Mitchell, a deaf woman with a sweet, faded face, who was supposed to have loved him platonically for the best part of her life.
Phibbs, like many of the younger writers, despised Russell, whom he regarded as an old windbag. I was prepared to do the same, but, while we were still arguing, Phibbs said, ‘The difference between your generation and ours is that we have had no youth.’ ‘Oh, really!’ Russell replied with an air of great concern, and I disgraced myself by a roar of laughter in which Russell joined. One of his favourite quotations was a phrase from The Three Musketeers – ‘I perceive if we do not kill one another we shall be good friends’; and I think at that moment Russell and I decided we should be friends, for as we were leaving he put his arm round my shoulder and said, ‘Send me something for the paper.’
I did, and he printed it, and another source of income became open to me. Admittedly it was small, but when one has never had anything the occasional guinea or two guineas seems like wealth. I could now spend a night in a hotel – though six and sixpence for bed and breakfast struck me as wicked – so I went to Dublin, mastered even my timidity, and visited him in his house in Rathgar on Sunday evening. I went through the performance I went through so often in later years, climbed the steps, pulled the bell, heard the smelly old dog begin to yelp; and then Russell, shouting and kicking excitedly at the dog, pulled me in by the hand. He had the usual Dublin combination of living- and dining-room, filled with paintings, mostly by himself, and all in glaring colours that matched the glaring overhead light. Corkery, who had once visited him, had told me that the pictures were ‘like Hampstead Heath on Sunday night’.
For the first hour he sat uneasily in his big chair in the middle of the room, intent on the doorbell, which was always anticipated by the infernal dog. It was like sitting in the middle of Grand Central Station. Visitors to Dublin – Americans, Japanese, and Chinese – were always dropping in, as well as a gang of adoring old ladies whom I called ‘The Holy Women’. He lectured to them all, telling American agriculturists how to organize co-operatives and Indians how to understand Gandhi, and suggesting new themes to poets and story-tellers. He talked in set patterns and phrases which had endured for years, some indeed of which could be traced back to his boyhood.
‘You know, A.E.,’ I said to him years later, ‘back in 1904 Joyce has you saying: “The only question about a work of art is, out of how deep a life does it spring.” ’
‘Well, that’s clever of him,’ Russell replied. ‘That’s true, you know. I may have said that.’
He said it at least once a day. What was more he did not realize that I was joking him.
He was a creature of habit, and his conversation, like his life, like his pictures, ran in patterns; well-formed phrases, ideas, quotations, and anecdotes that he repeated year after year without altering an inflection. He was unskilful in the way he introduced them, and they were usually so general in their application that they had a tendency to obliterate the point in discussion. ‘Leonardo advised young painters to study the stains in old marble to discover compositions for their own paintings’ was a standard phrase that was exceedingly difficult to relate to any subject one was considering. After a time you got to see Leonardo hovering in the air a mile off and found yourself trying to ward him off as if he were a wasp. […]
I don’t think I ever left that house or the office without an armful of books, good, bad, and indifferent, and later, when I was in hospital, Russell continued to send me regular parcels of them – ‘to raise your soul above the troubles of the flesh’ as he would explain.
He was that sort of man. Within half an hour he enveloped you in universal curiosity and affection in which shyness was forgotten. It was like an old fur coat, a little bit smelly and definitely designed for someone of nobler stature, but, though it might threaten you with suffocation, it never left you feeling cold. He would find you a new doctor, a new wife, a new lodging, or a new job, and if you were ill would cheerfully come and nurse you. […]
As all Russell’s discoveries had to be pronounced on by Yeats, Russell ordered me to visit him on one of his Monday evenings. In those days Sunday was Russell’s night, Monday Yeats’s, Tuesday afternoon Sarah Purser’s, Sunday afternoon Seamus O’Sullivan’s. Yeats’s Mondays were peculiar because they were all male; on Monday nights he discussed sex, except when Lady Gregory was staying, and, of course, it would be my rotten luck to be ordered to the presence when she was staying and no one else came, so that I had to face Yeats and herself alone. At that time I did not know Mrs Yeats, who could manage to make even me feel at home. To complete my confusion, Lady Gregory wore a mantilla as though for an audience with the Pope.
It was all too much for a raw youth who was terrified of social occasions anyhow. Yeats’s study was kept deliberately dark, and everything in it was expensive and beautiful; the masks from his dance plays, the tall bookcases with the complete sets of the classics, and the long, orderly table with the tall silver candlesticks. Even Corkery could not have said that the pictures were ‘like Hampstead Heath on Sunday evening’. And nothing less like Russell could be imagined than the tall man in the well-cut blue suit with the silk shirt and bow-tie who came shuffling in, holding his hand out high as though he expected you to kiss his ring – a beautiful ring, as it happened. Never could you imagine an Irish country-man giving Yeats an approving look and shouting, ‘Bring in the whiskey now, Mary, and be continually bringing in the hot water,’ which was how Russell was received in one Irish town. Later, the very sight of Yeats at the door would send Mother scuttling to her bedroom. There was something ecclesiastical about the blind man’s stare, the ceremonial washing of the hands and the languid unction of the voice. That night I noticed that he said ‘weld’ and ‘midder’ for ‘world’ and ‘murder’.
There was a touch of the bird about him as well; the eyes, like those of a bird, seemed to be at the sides rather than the front of the face, and his laugh tended to be harsh, abrupt, and remote – a caw, as Moore called it. When he was happy and forgot himself, animation seemed to flow over him. He sat forward, arms on his knees, washing his hands over and over, the pose sometimes broken by a loud, harsh, throaty laugh and the tossing back of the big bird’s head while he sat bolt upright in his chair gripping his lapels and raising his brows with a triumphant stare; sometimes he broke it by tweaking his nose; most characteristically perhaps by raising his index finger for attention. But when he was really excited his whole face lit up as from a light inside. It was astonishing, because even in old age when he was looking most wretched and discontented that blaze of excitement would sweep over his face like a glory, like a blast of sunlight over a moor, and from behind the mask a boy’s tense eager face looked out at you. […]
Russell was extraordinarily inquisitive about women, and with an ingenuousness that even I found upsetting. Though he never talked to me of his wife, and rarely of the one son he mentioned
at all, I had the feeling that he was unhappy in his marriage and inclined to think that women were a plague.
‘Do you have flirtations with pretty girls?’ he asked me one night.
‘Sometimes,’ I admitted – I should have hated to confess how rarely.
‘And do they get you to write poems for them?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s fine,’ he said happily. ‘Write them all the poems they want, but take care they don’t marry you. That’s the devil of it.’
When he came back from his first American tour he was in a wild state of excitement about American girls. He had spent a birthday in Vassar or some other women’s college and the girls had made him a birthday cake with a great mass of candles. Afterwards, one of them had come up and kissed him, and when he started, said, ‘Oh, boy, do be your age!’
‘They must be the most beautiful girls the world has ever seen,’ he said to me. ‘If only you could get them to sit in a corner and keep quiet, you could admire them for hours. But they will talk!’
At the same time he tried to arrange a marriage between Simone Tery, a beautiful French journalist, and me. He showed his love for Simone as I never knew him to show love for anyone, but knowing his passion for generalization I assumed – quite correctly, I think – that I was not the only young Irish writer he had chosen as a husband for her. He merely adored her, and wanted somebody in Dublin to marry her so that he could be sure of entertainment one evening a week. He got off on the wrong foot with Simone and myself, because when we met for dinner he looked at me and said, ‘Isn’t she nice?’ and then at Simone and said, ‘Isn’t he nice?’ and for the rest of the evening we sat and glowered at one another. He made it worse by congratulating her on not using ‘any of those horrible cosmetics that American girls ruin their beauty with’, and she, made up as skilfully as only a Frenchwoman can be, modestly lowered her eyes and said, ‘I only use them on particular occasions, A.E.’
He was very impressed one night when I repeated a bawdy story a girl had told me and said with great solemnity: ‘That is a wonderful example of the economy of Nature which I am always impressing on you. Nature intended me to be a lyric poet, so I never met a girl who told stories like that. She intended you to be a realistic novelist, so she just throws girls of that sort in your way.’ […]
Yeats was a natural organizer, never happy unless he was organizing something or somebody – a great bully, as I discovered later, and an outrageous flatterer. When he began to bully me I always gave him lip, almost on principle. After my father, I never quarrelled so much with anyone, and even if one allows that I am a bit in the same line myself, it takes two to make a disagreement last as long as ours. One might say that I was discovering my real father at last, and that all the old attitudes induced by my human father came on top. Yet I can truthfully say that when, towards the end of his life, I became his devoted slave, it was entirely due to his generosity, because with no one else was I so crude and uppish.
His principal weakness was that he was easily bored, and L. A. G. Strong was not the only one who bored him. George Russell bored him too, and many others, and he made no effort to conceal it. This, I think, cost him the affection of a number of people who would have been better friends than some of those he made.
Apart from these things, I think of him as a shy and rather lonely man who desperately wanted to be friends, and was utterly loyal to the friends he made. It took a long time to appreciate that shyness in him because it tended to make him portentous and overwhelming in society and even in the home. Once, when Michael Yeats was pulling his sister’s hair and Mrs Yeats failed to separate them, Daddy was summoned. He stalked slowly and solemnly to an armchair, sat down, and recited, ‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite’, and then stalked out again, apparently feeling he had done all that was expected of a father. The children never became intimate with him: even the marvellous ‘Prayer for My Daughter’ was written while Anne was safely in another building. Michael once got his own back by asking in a piercing voice as his father went by, ‘Mummy, who is that man?’ and Yeats was deeply hurt. […]
He knew, too, though I never told him so, that I did not share his interest in spiritualism. One night I asked him bluntly if he ever had had an experience that could not be explained in strictly rational terms. He thought for a while and grew embarrassed.
‘Yes, once. I think I can tell you. You are, after all, a man of the world. I was having a love affair with a certain woman and she said she was pregnant. I was very worried because I felt that if she was, I must marry her. I came home to Ireland and confessed to an old aunt. “Don’t believe her,” she said. “She’s having you on.” So I went to a certain famous medium and asked for her help without telling her what my trouble was. She went into a trance and produced some writing that neither of us could read. Finally I took it to the British Museum and they told me to come back in a week. When I went back the head of one of the departments said, “Mr Yeats, this is a most remarkable document. It is written in the form of Hebrew taught in the German universities in the seventeenth century.” ’
Then Yeats looked at me triumphantly, his head tossed back, the big, blind eyes behind the spectacles challenging me to explain that one if I could.
‘Never mind what sort of Hebrew it was written in,’ I said. ‘Did it tell you whether you were the father of the child or not?’
The practical Corkman! He sat back wearily – rationalists are so hard to argue with.
‘Oh, no, no,’ he said vaguely. ‘It just said things like “O great poet of our race!” ’ Clearly he thought this important, but I didn’t. As a story-teller I felt that the point had got lost. […]
But no reasonable human being could fight for long with Yeats. As well as a successor for Hunt I had to find a successor for Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who insisted on leaving with him, and I arranged to send Yeats’s daughter, Anne, who had been assisting Tanya, to study stage design with Baty and Jouvet in Paris. I had warned Anne Yeats that Baty was a magnificent director with no notion of acting, and Jouvet a magnificent director of players with no notion of stage design. God alone knows what complicated intrigue Yeats saw in this, for it would simply never have occurred to him that I had been watching his daughter’s work with interest, but as no one was allowed to excel Yeats in courtesy he arranged to publish a superb edition of my translation of ‘The Lament for Art O’Leary’, with coloured drawings by his brother, Jack.
A short time later I invited myself out to Rathfarnham to present a friend of mine to Mrs Yeats. At once Yeats started explaining to me that as a father he could not possibly allow his daughter to go to Paris unprotected, and that she must go to the Old Vic instead, where she could be looked after by some aunt, cousin, or friend. I replied that nothing I had seen in the Old Vic had given me the idea that we had anything to learn from it and that I wouldn’t consent to spend a penny of the theatre’s money on sending Anne there. Yeats grew sulkier and sulkier, but George, seeing us to the door later in the evening, lifted my spirits by doing a dance step in the hall. ‘That old bully!’ she said. ‘It’s about time someone stood up to him. He’s always trying to push people around.’
It was not the first time she had saved an evening for me. I knew the apparent childish selfishness of Yeats, because once when I was seeing him home, he went to his club, and told me that George was ill with some infectious disease and that he couldn’t go home. I, thinking of George by herself in the house, said ‘Oh, that’s awful!’ and Yeats replied mournfully, ‘Yes. You see, I can’t even get at my books.’ But I also saw the other side, which apparently Higgins didn’t see. Once, when we went in a taxi to some Board meeting, I paid the taxi driver and Yeats grabbed the money frantically from his hand and created a scene while he tried to find money of his own – always a difficult task for him as he never could make out where his pockets were. I said, ‘Oh, stop it, W.B.,’ and he turned on me. ‘You don’t understand, O’Connor,’ he gasped. ‘I wouldn’t mind, but my wife
would never forgive me.’ Maybe only a story-teller can understand that, but I knew that a man who worried about what he was going to tell his wife about who paid the taxi fare was a man in love, whatever anybody else might think. […]
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.
From LEINSTER, MUNSTER AND CONNAUGHT – SLIGO AND YEATS
SLIGO IS Yeats, and will be now for ever. A great poet impresses himself on a landscape like a phase of history, and for me East Dorset will always be as much Hardy as Celt or Saxon. One can scarcely look at the toppled-down crown of Knocknarea to the south without remembering ‘The host is riding from Knocknarea’, or at the long, shiplike beak of Ben Bulben to the north without remembering ‘When first I saw her on Ben Bulben’s side’. People have swum Lough Gill to reach Innisfree without knowing that the island Yeats really wrote of goes by the unpoetic name of Cat Island. One north of Ireland man with the strong utilitarian northern streak in him was heard to murmur as he looked over Sligo bridge at the foaming weir: ‘I would that we were, my beloved, white swans on the foam of the sea. Man dear, there’s enough water there to wash all the water-closets in Sligo.’
The Best of Frank O'Connor Page 25