RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  If this is the end of Europe, it is its beginning, too. Like Cape Cod, from which it is separated and joined by an ocean, a man might stand here and put all the continent behind him. And as with other places where the land runs out and the rest of the world rushes in – like Stornoway or Rotterdam or Lisbon or Galle – Bantry has the sadness and the beauty, the brutality and the abandonment of the sea. Its streets were once flooded thoroughfares that coursed as canals through the town. Now its harbour has been reclaimed as a car park, although on market day it is taken over by ducks and hens in feather-strewn cages, a dog wearing a hat, and a man with a brown paper bag over his head reciting his own poems. The public houses are still public houses, with their shelves of groceries and round tables, but the panelled front parlours, where the respectable ladies of the town once drank, are empty.

  People have lived here for millennia. A medieval manuscript, Lebor Gabála Érenn, the book of the taking of Ireland, suggests that Bantry was the site of the island’s first settlers, landing at a place which became known as Dún na mBárc, the Fortress of the Boats. In this account, Cessair, granddaughter of Noah, leads fifty maidens and three men to the western edge of the world forty days before the Flood in the hope that the waters will not reach them there. Only one, Fintán, survives the inundation. He turns into a salmon, then an eagle and a hawk, and lives for five thousand years before resuming human shape, to tell the story of Ireland. But in the mid-nineteenth century these mythic shores were invaded by a new species: Phytophthora infestans, a fungal pathogen brought over the same connecting sea, and its spots appeared on the potato’s leaves as a sign of things to come. The first report was published in the Dublin Evening Post, 6 September 1845:

  We regret to learn that the blight of the potato crop, so much complained of in Belgium and several of the English counties has affected the crop, and that to a considerable extent, in our own immediate locality … We are assured by a gentleman of vast experience that the injury sustained by potatoes from blight on his domain is very serious – that they are entirely unfit for use; and he suggests potatoes so injured should be immediately dug out for the use of the pigs.

  With three million people dependent on potatoes to survive, disaster soon followed. They died in numbers so great that only individual cases can hint at the suffering of the whole. On 11 January 1847, The Times reported from West Cork with an opening line that might have come from a Dickens novel: ‘The last accounts from this district are of a most dismal character.’ Such dispatches would have been unacceptable if they had emerged from Hampshire or Devon; distance and disdain allowed them to exist, separated by a fatal sea. In the first year of the Famine, forty-two thousand tons of oats and eighty-five thousand tons of wheat and flour were exported from Ireland, while ministers in Whitehall declared trade had to be healthy to sustain the country during the crisis.

  These were feudal scenes out of a new Dark Age, enacted at the outer limits of the industrial world. In Bantry, six inquests agreed that their subjects ‘came to their deaths by starvation’, including two-year-old Catherine Sheehan, who died at Christmas, having spent her last days eating only seaweed, ‘part of which was produced by Dr M’Carthy, who held a post mortem examination on her body’. One mother and her three children were pulled from a freezing dyke; the post-mortem showed that the woman had not eaten for over twenty hours beforehand; she appeared to have drowned her children with her.

  Other bodies were turned partly green from eating dock leaves, partly blue from cholera and dysentery. Dignified human beings began to resemble feral beasts, reduced to foraging in a landscape patrolled by packs of dogs scavenging on the dead.

  Catalogue? Photograph? The Illustrated London News published eyewitness drawings by its artist, James Mahoney. He portrayed skin-and-bone beings – like the children of Want and Ignorance that challenged Scrooge’s Malthusian enthusiasm – living in a land laid waste by some terrible, undeclared war. Evicted families set up shelters in the ruins of their own homes; known as scalpeens, they were little better than pits with canvas roofs. Others put up structures like whales’ bones. Still more meagre were scalps, mere scrapes in the ground like the nests of shore birds.

  Ireland was being ethnically cleansed, as New England had been rid of its Native Americans or Van Diemen’s Land of its Aboriginal Australians. ‘In such, or still more wretched abodes, burrowing as they can, the remnant of the population is hastening to an end, and after a few years will be as scarce nearly as the exterminated Indians, except the specimens that are carefully preserved in the workhouse.’ Invoking the kind of images that Elizabeth Barrett Browning used in Aurora Leigh, the magazine saw it all as a by-product of industrialism, an act of imperial vivisection, ‘a sort of Majendie experiment made on human beings – not on cats in an air-pump, or on rabbits with prussic acid’.

  Imprisoned by the sea, at the edge of everything, the land allowed such scenes. With its liminal bogs and uprearing shores, its primitive rites and its infestations of spores, Ireland’s insular fate was written in the water.

  As a boy, I sensed a sort of Irishness in myself. I felt exiled in England – even though it was the only place I had ever lived. It was an otherness doubly bequeathed by being Roman Catholic, as if I weren’t of my country at all.

  St Patrick’s, my primary school in the waterside suburb of Woolston, was physically and spiritually aligned around its Edwardian tin church, a somehow temporary building ready to be packed up should pagans overseas require its ark-like presence, or should the locals object to its Papist presence on English soil. Painted dark green, with a wooden spire and an interior fitfully lit by cheap stained glass, it was a colonial survival in a parish created in 1879 by the Irish chaplain to the nearby military hospital as a mission to this area of shipbuilders. Importing God into their lives, it looked a little like a ship itself, but was now used as our school hall where we attended assemblies and prize-givings. Across the playground stood another tin building, also dark green, imported from the field hospital at Netley. It is odd to think that my first classroom would have been familiar to Wilfred Owen.

  Other classes were conducted in a cylindrical hut from the nineteen-forties; I thought its corrugated iron ribs were constructed to resist ordnance falling from the sky. In the summer, the grass grew tall over an underground air-raid shelter, a burrow built to protect schoolchildren from bombs. Now it housed our rufous and irascible caretaker, a cigarette perpetually in his mouth. Together, church and school occupied a block of their own, an island of faith in a sea of industry. At the bottom of the road lay the shipyards and a floating bridge, little changed since Titanic sailed from here ten years after our tin church was built, taking with it six parishioners who worked below its decks, men from Cork and Dublin. Their apartness was underlined by the nickname for the area where I grew up and where I still live: Spike Island, a convict depot in Cork Harbour; a slur on Irish workers, who were seen as little better than criminals.

  Next to our school was the new church, built in the nineteen-thirties. Over its entrance stood an eroding stone statue of St Patrick, after whom I was first named. Inside was a huge painting of him, dark and brown, a crozier in one hand, the other casting out the snakes slithering at his feet. On his feast day, fresh bunches of shamrock, stems wound with silver foil, appeared at the back of the church, miraculously imported from the Emerald Isle. They seemed seaweedy to me, grown in holy water. I never got to wear them; they were claimed by the black-haired ladies who mumbled the rosary through Mass as a never-ending chorus while the priest, faceless in crimson and yard-deep lace with his back to us, intoned Latin at an altar whose core was charged with the relic of a saint like a holy battery.

  With its tall narrow windows of green and yellow glass, the interior had a watery light, like a giant aquarium. In an anteroom was the font in which my two sisters were drowned and reborn. Stone stoops contained that same irradiated water, which looked and felt and smelled like ordinary water but was, we knew, molecularly dif
ferent. I waited for my turn to enter a cupboard where I knelt at the partition between me and absolution, confessing my sins through a grille as though to a cashier. Head bowed, the priest listened in the darkness, and sent me out forgiven in exchange for some penitential prayers. Ours were elemental rites: the anointing oil of chrism might have been whale oil as far as I knew, and the ashes scraped on my forehead at the beginning of Lent ground down from human bones. As we lined up to receive communion, the parquet floor yielded to the stiletto heels of young women, leaving fossil traces of their fashion in the herringbone pattern.

  I may have had an overactive imagination, but nothing to a child is merely what it is, and I gave all these things other meanings. Perched on a leatherette kneeler, unsteady in my grey shorts and bare legs, I’d peer through praying fingers at the pair of double-height altarpieces made of stained glass set, not against the light, but in shallow niches either side of the nave, where the votive candles flickered on iron stands. They were unseeing windows, through which I might enter another world.

  To the left rose the red-robed Christ, His Sacred Heart exposed in His holy chest and outlined in glittering tesserae of gold mosaic; He held one hand over us in a closed-finger gesture of blessing. To the right was the Virgin, enfolded in heavenly blue – more origami than gown – floating on a pale-green background imitating marble, two wavy blue lines at her feet symbolising the sea of which she was our guiding star. She hovered over the waves, calmer of storms, saviour of the drowned, star of the sea. It was she to whom we prayed, mourning and weeping in our vale of tears as we sheltered under her mantle. And in her bone-china hands she held the Christ Child, beatific in a purple tunic, suspended in front of His mother, an icon within an icon.

  These altar images may have been made from stained glass, but nothing could be more pure. Their suspended figures and perfect doll-like heads surrounded by golden haloes bore little relationship to any reality. That is why I loved them and lived in fear of them. They could have come from Constantinople or another world; their open, almond-eyed faces and folded bodies seemed androgynous and eternal. I didn’t know then that these larger-than-life-sized confections – which shimmered in the candlelight of winter afternoons as we recited the rites of Benediction, drugged by blue incense dragged across the altar in a swinging censer – were created after the smoke and fire of the Blitz had left the church a smouldering ruin, its ribcage roof reduced to blackened shards. Nor did I know that they were commissioned for the restored building from the Harry Clarke Studio in Dublin, as were our Stations of the Cross, fixed around the walls – fourteen square-framed scenes of Jesus’s journey from judgement to crucifixion, depicted in painted glass jigsaw pieces held together in soft lead strips; fourteen stops of condemnation, torture and death, from station to station.

  Christ had walked off the altar and into a cartoon strip. As Pilate washed his hands, Christ shouldered His cross; Veronica wiped His bloody face, leaving a ghostly image of suffering on the orange-brown cloth; He was stripped by the centurions and nailed to the wood and raised to the stormy stained-glass skies; and His body was laid in the sepulchre, as a lurid Palestinian sun set in the distance.

  These glass pictures were a narrative shattered by trauma and put back together again. As the never-ending liturgy was intoned in unintelligible Latin I knelt in reverie, reflexively genuflecting, sinking in incense and hypnotised by Te Deums and heretical tedium, following the stations around the walls, heretically lusting over the soldier undressing Jesus, with his green cloak, shiny helmet, body-moulded breastplate and bare brown legs poking out of an armoured skirt, and fantasising that I might levitate into the air, defying gravity as the holiest saints could, hanging there like an angel to the amazement of the congregation.

  These images anchored me to ritual itself. I would never escape them. I did not realise then what they meant for my body and soul: the Lamb of God, whose human sacrifice replaced animal sacrifice as He died for my sins. Like my blue notebook, their stories foretold my future. As if I’d already given up my own body, before I knew what I could do with it.

  Henry Patrick Clarke was born in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day in 1889. He was to grow up to be a reserved young man, his shyness at odds with the Beardsleyesque figures that he drew and which looked rather like him, with his huge dark eyes, angular face, slender hands and aesthetic air. After art school, he had joined the family firm and worked on church commissions. But his stained-glass, symbolist saints were decidedly secular and androgynous, almost opiated in their wide-eyed reveries; looking at them now, it is extraordinary that he was allowed to install them in university chapels, parish churches and convents, shedding their stupefying light on sacred sites. W.B.Yeats acclaimed Clarke, and the writer and mystic George Russell, ‘Æ’, called him ‘one of the strangest geniuses of his time’, who ‘might have incarnated here from the dark side of the moon’.

  Operating in the Celtic Twilight, Clarke’s secular art grew ever more weird, from dreamy mermaids and staring revenants and ambiguous angels with red-gold hair, to Caliban figures with cloven hands and finned feet and etiolated, pale femmes that looked as though they’d grown in the dark, while dangling in the background, octopus-like phalluses peered through all-seeing eyes at the tips of their tentacles.

  Caught between the fin-de-siècle and the new century, neither one thing nor the other, Clarke’s figures tumble out of Wilde’s Salome, the Russian Ballet and Keats and Shelley’s fantasies of hermaphrodites and fauns, their gender and species undefined; equally, they might have emerged from one of Owen’s poems. In their stained-glass incarnations, squeezed into gothic frames and psychedelic compositions as though the Abbot Suger had taken acid, they were born in the First World War and the Jazz Age, but their lux nova was medieval, evoking a pre-Reformation mystery. Their saints are elaborately faerie-like, folded in jewelled costume-coffins as stiff as the glass out of which they were wrought, contained by poisonous lead strips. Elaborate flowers interbreed with sea urchins on the ocean floor, clustered like the dizzying patterns in a painting by Klimt or the beads embedded in a Baccarat paperweight.

  Ever since 1909, when he was twenty, Clarke had spent his summers on the remote Aran island of Inisheer, with ‘nothing between him and America’. Staying on this ‘very primitive place’ with his friend and collaborator Austin Molloy, Harry wore the Sunday-best white felt suit and rawhide pampooties of the people of the sea; another friend, Seán Keating, depicted him reclining among the ruins of an ancient church like a languid monk. Painting and sketching by the shore each day, he became fascinated by the island’s marine flora and fauna he saw in rock pools. Back in Dublin, he created a series of windows based on Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, painting lunettes – half moons – entwined with seaweed and jellyfish. He was working with light and water. His images were stained, acided and etched on glass made from kelp and sand from the sea, just as glass itself is a liquid formed of amorphous molecules through which we see light slowed down. Clarke’s fabrications were environments as much as artefacts, as complex and fragile as the Blaschkas’ creations. Indeed, he would have been familiar with the glassmakers’ work: Dublin’s museum of natural history owned more than five hundred of their models.

  From sandy Atlantic shores via museum vitrines, those same medusa tentacles found their way into his illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Creating islands of his own, his work was set against nature as much as part of it; its blackness out of darkness dependent on the rising and setting sun. Filtering the sea light outside, his windows are inundated with gulf-warmed waters and studded with semi-precious reefs, while Christ’s disciples slumber on the sea bed, pillowed by jellyfish and anemones.

  In Dingle, the westernmost tip of Ireland, a peninsula that tapers into the Atlantic under a mountain named after Brendan the Navigator and in whose harbour I’ve just watched a lone, psychotic dolphin swimming endlessly from one boat to another, I wander through a decomm
issioned convent, its empty corridors smelling of institutional confinement. The sun forces through its chapel windows, loaded with Clarke’s images. I wonder what the nuns made of these perfervid evocations of their faith, reimagined by a young man from Dublin who, stripped to a loincloth, had himself tied to the beams of his studio to pose as a living model for the Crucifixion.

  With his puny body and bony ribs and his closed eyes he seems to have entered a transcendent, sacrificial state like one of his soporific saints, suspended in ecstasy, with flames all but issuing from his fingertips. He looks as emaciated as a famine victim or a shell-shocked soldier under observation, or the malnourished bodies he saw in Dublin’s public baths. He was already a martyr. Weakened by the fumes of chemicals used in the production of his miraculous glass and by a near-fatal bicycle accident, he was sent to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, in 1929 in an attempt to repair his consumptive lungs. He died two years later, at the age of forty-one.

  And although Clarke had no physical hand in our suburban church – his son and daughter continued to run his studio, and it was they who supplied our stained glass – our Christ had Harry’s dark eyes, his angular face, his unwrapped body. I look up at those images now and don’t wonder at my childhood fantasies and all those creatures I drew in my book. All these saints were alternative stories for me, darker than any fairy tale. They held their fates before them – and before me too, in a world where war hung over my head like that nuclear sunset over Calvary. I had an overactive imagination, but what use is an underactive one? All that got you was a cheap suit and a briefcase. You might say they were the instruments of my oppression, but I thank God for glorious St Patrick, the saint of our isle, and for all the bleeding, martyred saints.