The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  A LEARNED MISTRESS

  It is part of the legend of Irish history that the Renaissance missed Ireland completely, but Ireland was a part, however minute, of Europe, and in their dank and smoky castles, the Irish and Anglo-Irish aristocracy lived a life that fundamentally differed little from the life that went on in the castles of the Loire. Isobel Campbell, the great Countess of Argyle, wrote a poem to her chaplain’s – but really, I can’t say what – and the joke was taken up by her Campbell kinsmen, who still wrote classical Irish. She might have written this little poem, and who will dare to say that it does not breathe the whole spirit of the Renaissance?

  Tell him it’s all a lie;

  I love him as much as my life;

  He needn’t be jealous of me –

  I love him and loathe his wife.

  If he kill me through jealousy now

  His wife will perish of spite,

  He’ll die of grief for his wife –

  Three of us dead in a night.

  All blessings from heaven to earth

  On the head of the woman I hate,

  And the man I love as my life,

  Sudden death be his fate.

  ADVICE TO LOVERS

  The way to get on with a girl

  Is to drift like a man in a mist,

  Happy enough to be caught,

  Happy to be dismissed.

  Glad to be out of her way,

  Glad to rejoin her in bed,

  Equally grieved or gay

  To learn that she’s living or dead.

  I AM STRETCHED ON YOUR GRAVE

  I am stretched on your grave

  And would lie there forever;

  If your hands were in mine

  I’d be sure we’d not sever.

  My apple tree, my brightness,

  ’Tis time we were together

  For I smell of the earth

  And am stained by the weather.

  When my family thinks

  That I’m safe in my bed

  From night until morning

  I am stretched at your head,

  Calling out to the air

  With tears hot and wild

  My grief for the girl

  That I loved as a child.

  Do you remember

  The night we were lost

  In the shade of the blackthorn

  And the chill of the frost?

  Thanks be to Jesus

  We did what was right,

  And your maidenhead still

  Is your pillar of light.

  The priests and the friars

  Approach me in dread

  Because I still love you

  My love and you dead,

  And would still be your shelter

  From rain and from storm,

  And with you in the cold grave

  I cannot sleep warm.

  A WORD OF WARNING

  To go to Rome

  Is little profit, endless pain;

  The Master that you seek in Rome,

  You find at home, or seek in vain.

  A GREY EYE WEEPING

  With the breaking of the Treaty of Limerick by the English in 1691 the Irish Catholics descended into a slavery worse than anything experienced by Negroes in the Southern States. (When the Irish came to America, the Negroes called them ‘White Niggers’.) This period is best represented in the few authentic poems of Egan O’Rahilly, a Kerry poet who lived between 1670 and 1726. In this fine poem he approaches, not one of the masters he would have approached fifty years before – the MacCarthys – but Lord Kenmare, one of the new Anglo-Irish gentry. Hence the bitter repetition of the fellow’s name. O’Rahilly himself would have considered ‘Valentine’ a ridiculous name for anyone calling himself a gentleman, and as for ‘Brown’, he would as soon have addressed a ‘Jones’ or a ‘Robinson’. O’Rahilly is a snob, but one of the great snobs of literature.

  That my old bitter heart was pierced in this black doom,

  That foreign devils have made our land a tomb,

  That the sun that was Munster’s glory has gone down

  Has made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown.

  That royal Cashel is bare of house and guest,

  That Brian’s turreted home is the otter’s nest,

  That the kings of the land have neither land nor crown

  Has made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown.

  Garnish away in the west with its master banned,

  Hamburg the refuge of him who has lost his land,

  An old grey eye, weeping for lost renown,

  Have made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown.

  EGAN O’RAHILLY

  From MY FATHER’S SON – YEATS AS EDITOR

  YEATS … published two books of my translations from the Irish and rewrote them in the process. Gogarty once invited me to come to Yeats’s flat with him – ‘He’s writing a few little lyrics for me, and I’d like to see how he’s getting on.’ It was rather like that. I went one night to Yeats’ for dinner and we fought for God knows how long over a single line of an O’Rahilly translation I had done – ‘Has made me travel to seek you, Valentine Brown.’ At first I was fascinated by the way he kept trying it out, changing pitch and intonation. ‘Has made me – no! Has made me travel to seek you – No, that’s wrong, HAS MADE ME TRAVEL TO SEEK YOU, VALENTINE BROWN – no!’

  Long before that evening I had tired of the line, and hearing it repeated endlessly in Yeats’ monotone I felt it sounded worse.

  ‘It’s tautological,’ I complained. ‘It should be something like “Has made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown,” ’ and he glared at me as if he had never seen me before.

  ‘No beggars! No beggars!’ he roared, and I realized that, like other theatre men I have known, he thought the writer’s place was at home.

  All the same, it was as interesting to work over poetry with him as it was later to work over plays. He was an absolute master of both, and his principal virtue was his principal defect. He had absolutely no ear for music that I could discern, though this, of course, never shook his faith in his own musical genius. He told a story of how he had gone to Dr Sigerson’s one day when Sigerson had an old countrywoman in a hypnotic trance and made her feel Yeats’ face. ‘Poet,’ she had said, then ‘great poet,’ then ‘musician’. ‘And then I knew she was a genuine medium,’ Yeats declared.

  KILCASH

  Kilcash was the home of one branch of the Butler family. Although I don’t think Yeats, who had Butler blood in him, knew this, it was one of his favourite poems, and there is a good deal of his work in it.

  What shall we do for timber?

  The last of the woods is down.

  Kilcash and the house of its glory

  And the bell of the house are gone,

  The spot where that lady waited

  Who shamed all women for grace

  When earls came sailing to greet her

  And Mass was said in the place.

  My grief and my affliction

  Your gates are taken away,

  Your avenue needs attention,

  Goats in the garden stray.

  The courtyard’s filled with water

  And the great earls where are they?

  The earls, the lady, the people

  Beaten into the clay.

  No sound of duck or geese there,

  Hawk’s cry or eagle’s call,

  No humming of the bees there

  That brought honey and wax for all,

  Nor even the song of the birds there

  When the sun goes down in the west,

  No cuckoo on top of the boughs there,

  Singing the world to rest.

  There’s mist there tumbling from branches,

  Unstirred by night and by day,

  And darkness falling from heaven,

  For our fortune has ebbed away,

  There’s no holly nor hazel nor ash there,

  The pasture’s rock and stone,

&n
bsp; The crown of the forest has withered,

  And the last of its game is gone.

  I beseech of Mary and Jesus

  That the great come home again

  With long dances danced in the garden,

  Fiddle music and mirth among men,

  That Kilcash the home of our fathers

  Be lifted on high again,

  And from that to the deluge of waters

  In bounty and peace remain.

  HOPE

  If seven hundred years of history can be summed up in four lines, they are all here.

  Life has conquered, the wind has blown away

  Alexander, Caesar and all their power and sway;

  Tara and Troy have made no longer stay –

  Maybe the English too will have their day.

  From IRISH MILES – FATHER AND SON

  WE WERE sitting in the hotel having coffee when the door opened and two men shuffled in. At first I took them to be a farmer and a drover, but then I realized that they were really father and son. It was market day in town and they were the only country people who came in, so I marked them down as individualists. The old man came in without raising his eyes or his knees, as if he were pushing some weight before him with his belly, like an engine. They sat down at a glass-topped table, the old man taking off his hat and laying it on a chair beside him. He had a glib of white hair which reached to the bridge of his nose, and a Punchinello chin. His son had the same sort of glib, but it was brown. He too took off his cap and put it on the remaining chair, but he was less a man of the world than his father, and as if he thought it might be considered presumptuous, or perhaps unsafe, or even that he might be charged extra for occupying the chair, he took it back and stowed it away on the ground beneath him.

  I watched the pair of them in fascination. There they sat, slumped in their chairs with their arms hanging by their sides, staring intently at the glass top of the table, like two mountains overlooking a lake. One or other of them must have ordered something, though it seemed to me that they didn’t, and that the order was understood. The waitress first brought a loaf and the younger man steadily cut slice after slice until it was all cut up. She brought a bowl of soup for the older man who slowly broke several slices of bread into it. She brought a cup of tea for the other, and he buttered one slice of bread, only to find himself with a bit of butter left on his knife which he didn’t know what to do with. He looked at it steadily for a while, and then, having a brain-wave, he buttered himself a second slice. After that he took good care not to experiment any further with the butter but saucered his tea. They never spoke during the whole meal, but when they had finished, and there wasn’t crust or crumb of the loaf remaining, the old man took a dirty cloth purse from his trousers pocket and handed the young man a coin. The young man looked at it in astonishment. ‘Is it a bob a head?’ he muttered. ‘Don’t know what it is,’ replied the other.

  Those now, so far as I could gather, were the only words uttered by either of them, so I feel that they are important enough to be placed on record. The young man retrieved his cap, put it on and went into the kitchen. He returned a few minutes later with what appeared to be a sixpenny bit and a few coppers and stood by his own chair turning them over and over as he looked at them. Maybe he was trying to do the sum, or maybe he was wondering whether he oughtn’t to ask his father for the change. I do not know what wild schemes may have been passing through his mind at that moment. He may even have been thinking of buying a packet of cigarettes – he was only about thirty-five and capable of any flightiness. His father ignored him, and went on looking at the table, still masticating in the manner of the late Mr Gladstone. He wasn’t in the least uneasy. Probably he had had other sons. He knew all young men were wild like that at least once in their lives. They all settled down in time.

  At last the young man gave it up; cast a longing look at the money and returned it. Without looking up the old man took it, put his hand in his trousers pocket, took out the big cloth purse and quietly put back the change. They went out exactly as they had come in, the old man still masticating, and I followed them with my eyes till they disappeared up the street. I felt exactly as if someone had punctured me and left me slowly dissolving through the legs of my trousers.

  From LEINSTER, MUNSTER AND CONNAUGHT

  CORK AND MENTAL AGE OF CITIES

  WATERFORD IS one thing, Cork another. I once travelled in the train from Kilkenny with an amiable lunatic. ‘Could you tell me the name of that castle?’ I asked, and he put on a grave face, scratched his head and replied slowly: ‘That comes under the heading of fortification.’ ‘But the bridge!’ I urged. ‘What do you call the bridge beside it?’ A look of real anguish came over the lunatic’s face as he scratched his head again. ‘That,’ he replied, ‘comes under the heading of navigation.’

  Something of the same pain affects me when I turn to try and write of my native city. ‘That comes under the heading of autobiography.’ Just in flashes and for a day or two only I can see it under the heading of topography: a charming old town with the spire of Shandon, two sides of it limestone and two sandstone, rising above the river, as beautiful as any of the Wren spires in the city of London, and the bow fronts which undulate along Patrick Street and the Grand Parade, with their front doors high up as in round towers, and flights of steps so high that they go up parallel to the pavement, because the river flows beneath, and areas had to be built upon street-level. I can admire as if I were a stranger the up and down of it on the hills as though it had been built in a Cork accent. But it doesn’t last. Objectively I am observing, subjectively I am observed, and in a way I know all too well.

  That isn’t, I think, because I am naturally melancholy or introspective, or because my memories of childhood are mainly unhappy ones. For a great part of my childhood I was very happy, but I cannot help thinking that towns need to be classified according to their maximum mental age, which should appear in every directory beside their population. It would be difficult for the average person over eighteen to be happy in Cork. Of course, there are worse towns, towns where the mental age is nearer twelve, and Dublin’s own mental age is not so high — twenty-three or -four at best. In the history of the world only a few towns have existed where a man could grow old in the fullest development of his mental faculties, and one of these murdered Socrates.

  CORK

  Apart from the usual miseries of adolescence and (with me) of poverty, our youth was happy enough. We knew that Cork was the most musical city in the United Kingdom – the visiting tenors told us that. It was also the most appreciative of great literature – visiting Shakespearean actors confirmed it. At some street corner Thackeray had heard two newsboys discuss I forget what classical text. We listened, but we must have got hold of the wrong newsboys, or perhaps it was the wrong text. We admired the university buildings, which he had said were worthy of Oxford High Street. Before we knew what the High was like that sounded like a compliment. We liked the Italianate names which some old fogy had foisted on the suburbs at either side of the river – Montenotte, Tivoli and the Marina – and walking along the river banks we remembered Rudin, and the German girls murmuring Guten Abend in the dusk, and I quoted Mignon’s Song:

  You know the land that is the citron’s home,

  Where golden fruit shines in the leafy gloom;

  From the blue sky a breath of rapture blows;

  High grows the laurel, still the myrtle grows:

  You know it well, it haunts me so,

  There, there, with you, my sweetheart, let me go.

  The town was full of marvellous characters – Chekhov characters, Dostoevsky characters; as in the usual English conception of the Irish, you had only to record what they said and produce a masterpiece.

  We recorded what they said all right, but it never mounted up to what you could call a masterpiece. We developed the defensive attitude of the provincial to the outsider, and yet were miserable if we hadn’t an outsider to practise it on. O’
Faolain ran a paper; I ran a dramatic society which produced The Cherry Orchard. We had to drop the line ‘At your age you should have a mistress’, but we were one better than the company playing Juno and the Paycock, in which the heroine had to have tuberculosis instead of a baby. Denouncing my misguided efforts to make a theatre, a priest wrote in the local paper that ‘Mike the Moke’ (meaning me) ‘will go down to posterity at the head of the Pagan Dublin Muses’. Though not on so high a literary plane, he was of one mind with another local priest who in his sermons deplored ‘the madness and melancholy of the moderns meandering in the marshes of mediocrity without God!’ Oh, we had characters all right, but they did not respond to the sort of romantic treatment we tried to give them.

  SLIGO

  Something of Sligo’s uniqueness comes of the fact that it is largely Protestant and has the explosive feeling of a border county, where, if people are not occupied in murdering one another, they may well settle down to write poetry and produce plays. It has nothing of the snug, smug majority orthodoxy of Protestant towns like Portadown or Catholic towns like Clonakilty. Dundalk, on the other side of the country, though less spectacular, has something of the same explosiveness. ‘I perceive,’ as one of the Three Musketeers says, ‘that if we do not kill one another we shall become very good friends.’

  I saw this incipient explosiveness at work for the first time when I went to Sligo as a young fellow on my first job. I lodged in the house of a Corkwoman, who, within a few days, told me in confidence that Sligo people were awful. I am always fascinated by the views of people on inhabitants of another locality; they are so like the views of English people on French or of Mr Hilaire Belloc on the Anglo-Saxons. ‘Thank God to be back to civilization!’ as the woman in Dover said to me after she had left the Channel packet. ‘Thank God to be back to non-robbery!’ as her husband added. When I asked the Corkwoman how awful the Sligo people were, she said they had no nature. She had been in one house where a pot of boiling water had toppled over on the daughter of the house, and, after one glance at her, her mother had said calmly: ‘No loss on her.’ My landlady’s husband was an ex-soldier. Occasionally of an evening after the mechanical chimes in the Catholic cathedral had played ‘The Men of the West’ with a missing note which always sent shudders down my spine, a window at the opposite side of the street would open and a neighbour’s gramophone would play ‘God Save the King’. Almost at the first insulting bars my landlord, ordinarily the placidest of men, would burst into my bedroom with a portable gramophone, throw open my window, thrust out the gramophone and put on a record of ‘A Soldier’s Song’. It was merely a matter of gramophones instead of machine-guns.