The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  He sat, the glass lax in his hand. The voices in the kitchen seemed strange as the sound of dolphins. Dead. As I feel dead. Cast off, cuckolded, dead. He turned and placed his glass on the table, his hand beginning its familiar tremor. And in that moment, oddly gleaming under glass, the photograph stared up at him, dispelling his dread, filling him with that now-familiar sense of giddy elation. For the first time since he had watched Beatrice walk down the museum steps with her lover, he felt cured. He picked up his cure, his antidote, the face of Europe’s first poète maudit. He stared at that face and the photograph eyes stared back, lit, it seemed, with the same unearthly excitement he now felt.

  “Ready?” His father’s voice, loud, unexpected, sounded at the kitchen door. His father stood, holding the dish aloft. Margrethe lit a match and ran it over the pool of liquid on the plate. Around the cherries and ice cream, a thin blue flame arose in aureole. His father advanced and laid the dish on the table.

  Mangan stared at the bubbling blue flame. The face that was his face seemed to rise before him in its haze, a genie he had summoned to restore his spirit. A genie who had vanquished Beatrice, that robber of his soul. Giddily, he raised his glass. “To Mangan the poet,” he cried. “To my resurrection. To my life!”

  The following morning, when his father and Margrethe set off for the ski slopes, Mangan settled on the living-room sofa, surrounded by books, with a pad for notes and torn slips of newspaper to use as page markers. He did not eat lunch and barely greeted the skiers when they returned at dusk. At six, his father went to the dining-room alcove to write an editorial for the Saturday edition of The Gazette, while Margrethe began to prepare dinner. At seven, when Mangan was called to the table, he did not realize what time it was. All day he had been living another man’s life. Now, released, he became so garrulous it was noticed. “I don’t believe it,” Margrethe said to him. “Do you realize that yesterday on the drive out from Montreal you hardly spoke two words to me.”

  “I’m sorry. I just feel a lot better today.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” his father said. “All that gloomy talk yesterday about not surviving. It seems what you needed was to find yourself an ancestor. How are you getting on with your reading?”

  “Great. It’s really astonishing. I’ve read the Father Drinan biography and also the O’Donoghue one, which seems to be the most complete and official-sounding. But I find the Drinan argument convincing. And the most amazing thing of all is the poems themselves. I remember years ago, when I first looked at them, I didn’t like them. But now when I read them, even though I don’t like them any more than I did then, I seem to remember them word for word. It’s as though they were my own poems. I feel I can recite them to you. It’s strange. Even though they’re not good. All those cheap tricks and jingles.”

  “Now, hold on,” his father said. “He wrote some good ones. ‘My Dark Rosaleen,’ for instance.”

  “My dark who?” Margrethe asked.

  “Ireland,” his father said. “My Dark Rosaleen is Ireland. Wait, I’ll read you a verse. Where’s the book, Jamie?”

  “No need,” Mangan said. “I told you. It’s uncanny, but I can remember it, after reading it just once. Listen:

  “O, the Erne shall run red,

  With redundance of blood,

  The Earth shall rock beneath our tread,

  And flames wrap hill and wood,

  And gun-peal and slogan-cry

  Wake many a glen serene,

  Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  My own Rosaleen!

  The Judgement Hour must first be nigh,

  Ere you can fade, ere you can die,

  My Dark Rosaleen!”

  “I like it,” Margrethe said. “It has a great ring.”

  “Yes, that one’s not bad,” Mangan agreed. “Corny but powerful.”

  “Corny or not,” his father said, “that’s the poem that made him Ireland’s greatest poet. That and a few others he wrote at the time of the famine.”

  “No, no,” Mangan said. “Mangan may be my double, but Yeats is Ireland’s greatest poet.”

  “Believe me,” his father said, “for the common people of Ireland, Mangan is still the big man. His poetry was the stuff that sent men out to kill the landlords.”

  “But Yeats’s poetry did that, too. Remember what he wrote about his play, Cathleen ni Houlihan?

  “Did that play of mine send out

  Certain men the English shot?”

  “For the sake of argument,” his father said, “I’ll grant you that. But our supposed ancestor is the one who struck a chord in the Irish soul. There’s a street and a square named after him in Dublin. And his statue stands in Saint Stephen’s Green.”

  “I wonder, does the statue look like Jamie?” Margrethe said.

  “I’ll let you know. I’m going to save up and go there this year.”

  “See what vanity does,” his father told Margrethe. “Before he knew he looked like a poet, he had no interest in Ireland.”

  “But is this the poet?” Carefully Mangan unwrapped the photograph from the handkerchief in his pocket. All day he had resisted looking at it. Now, as the eyes stared up at him, he again experienced a giddy sensation of elation. “It’s me, all right,” he said. “It’s an ancestor of mine. But was the Drinan biography right? From everything else I’ve read about Mangan, women played little or no part in his life. Poetry was his life. Books and booze. Let me read you a description I came across this afternoon. It’s by John Mitchel, an Irish patriot and lawyer, and it describes his first sight of Mangan in the library at Trinity College, Dublin.”

  “My God,” his father said. “Are we not to have a meal in this house without readings from the Mangan canon?”

  But Margrethe laughed and leaned across the table, touching his father’s arm. “Shh, Pat, shh!”

  Mangan rose and brought the book to the table. He sat, riffling its unevenly cut pages. “Here we are. This is what Mitchel wrote: ‘The first time the present biographer saw Clarence Mangan was in this wise: being in the College library and having occasion for a book in that gloomy apartment of the institution called the “Fagel” library, which is in the innermost recess of the stately building, an acquaintance pointed out to me a man perched on the top of a ladder, with the whispered information that the figure was Clarence Mangan. It was an unearthly and ghostly figure in a brown garment; the same garment, to all appearance, which lasted to the day of his death. The blanched hair was totally unkempt; the corpse-like features still as marble; a large book was in his hands, and all his soul was in that book. I had never heard of Clarence Mangan before, and knew not for what he was celebrated, whether as a magician, a poet, or a murderer; yet took a volume and spread it on a table, not to read, but with a pretence of reading to gaze upon this spectral creature upon the ladder.’ That’s Mitchel’s description. An eyewitness account.”

  “I like that part,” his father said. “‘A large book was in his hands, and all his soul was in that book.’” He smiled and repeated. “‘All his soul was in that book.’”

  “Trouble is,” Mangan said. “There’s a discrepancy between that description and this photograph. I’m thinking of the blanched hair. I’m going a little gray and so is the man in the photograph. But neither one of us has ‘blanched’ hair.”

  “Let me see that again,” his father said, and took up the photograph, studying it. “Yes, the hair is only partly gray. But in any case, I suspect, Mitchel’s description isn’t a factual one. He’s out to make an effect. Corpse-like features, et cetera. That’s not what I’d call straight reporting.”

  “There must be other descriptions of Mangan in the biographies that I haven’t read yet. Tomorrow I thought I’d read the other two. They’re both short. When are we going back to town, by the way?”

  “Let’s see,” his father said. “I’d thought about sometime late tomorrow afternoon.”

  “We might as well have sup
per here first,” Margrethe said. “If that’s all right with you?”

  His father considered. “Well, I have to drop in at the paper tomorrow night.”

  “Look at him, Jamie,” Margrethe said. “This year he promised he’d take three days off at New Year’s, no newspapers, no television, no radio. And did you see him this evening? Writing an editorial. And the minute he goes back to town, he goes straight to the city room.”

  “All this peace and quiet makes me nervous,” his father said. “But, okay. After supper will be fine. That suit you, Jamie?”

  “Good.”

  “By the way, if you want to hold on to those books for a while, you could take them to New York with you.”

  “I’ve been thinking. I may not go back.”

  He saw his father look at Margrethe, waiting for her reaction. Of course, his father would ask him to stay with them. He thought of his room, just down the corridor from the master bedroom. And Margrethe in his father’s bed. He saw Margrethe look at him, warm, smiling, innocent. “Not go back?” she said.

  “Well, I can’t afford to keep up that New York apartment on my own. I’m moving out. I thought I’d look for some sort of newspaper work here in Montreal. I don’t mean on The Gazette.”

  “But why not on The Gazette?” his father asked. “We might have a spot for you.”

  “I’d rather somewhere else, thanks.”

  “Well, I could have an exploratory word about you with George Harris at the Star. Find out the lie of the land.”

  “That might be good. Or maybe it would be better if I see him myself. Anyway, don’t worry. I’m only going to stay with you for a few days. I’ll find my own place.”

  “No problem,” his father said.

  “We love having you,” Margrethe said.

  Suddenly a feeling close to tears came upon him and he smiled at Margrethe, smiled at his father, smiled at this old man he had hoped would carry him piggyback over his fears. He had been right to come here. He picked up the daguerreotype, mysterious passport which had enabled him to cross the frontier of those fears, talisman to some future he did not understand. And looking into the eyes of his Doppelgänger, that strange elation came over him again, and there and then he resolved that no matter how long it took he would find out if this were really the photograph of the man who was Europe’s first poète maudit. And if it were, then he must be that man’s blood, heir to a talent of which until now he had been an indifferent caretaker. But the wasted years, the marriage years, were over and as he looked into the photograph’s eyes, the eyes seemed to glitter, urging him to start again, to pursue his true vocation. Carefully, he wrapped his handkerchief around the frame and placed the photograph in his pocket.

  The next evening, after supper, they began to drive back to Montreal. His father and Margrethe set off first in the Volvo, he following in his father’s old Dodge. It had been snowing for much of the afternoon and as they set out it became a blizzard which slowed their progress to about thirty miles an hour. His father had planned to reach the city before eleven, in time to check the front page of the paper’s Ottawa edition before it went to press. But eleven came and the two cars, solitary on the snowdrifted highway, had not reached the city’s outskirts. It was after midnight when they crossed the Champlain Bridge. On the far side of the bridge the Volvo pulled into the curb. Mangan swung the Dodge in to park behind it. His father got out of the Volvo and, pulling a scarf across his nose and mouth to shelter from the cutting sleet, came back to talk.

  “You go on home with Margrethe. I’ll take this car and drop in at the paper. I might just have time to check the makeup on the Final before they put it to bed.”

  “Let me come with you,” Mangan said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’d like to have a look at the old place again.”

  “All right, then. I’ll tell Margrethe.”

  Half an hour later, shaking snow from their rubbers, he and his father entered the newspaper lobby to a familiar atmosphere of flickering fluorescent lights, smells of cleaning fluid, the elevator arrow moving jerkily as though the descending elevator might get stuck between floors. Fourteen years ago, in this same building, Mangan had begun his newspaper life, arriving each day in midmorning, taking this elevator up to the City Room, going to the assignments book to read in Hoffmayer’s careless scrawl his assignments for the day.

  12 Noon. Rotary Service Luncheon. Mt. Royal Hotel. Mangan.

  2–5 Paraplegics Convention, Mt. Royal (ck. feature poss. Phone if Photog required). Mangan.

  8 Eddie Cantor Memorial Award Dinner. Speaker Moshe Dayan. Windsor Hotel. Mangan.

  Those were his days, a round of endless, dull local stories, at the beck of Hoffmayer, a doltish management lackey who turned out an uninspired set of local pages and who died suddenly at his desk during Mangan’s second year on the paper. He remembered Hoffmayer’s funeral, reporters and deskmen standing around in Mount Royal Cemetery one hot afternoon, waiting for a minister who did not appear. And how his father, impromptu, managed a graceful eulogy.

  The elevator door opened. Three proofreaders got out, their night’s work done. One of them, a stout old man in navy overcoat and earmuffs, nodded. “Night, Pat.”

  “Night, Bill,” Mangan’s father said.

  And now, looking at his father and the proofreader, Mangan remembered the day old Chief Garvey, the former managing editor, had retired. The staff had chipped in to buy him a matched set of luggage and it was presented in the City Room, after the Final, with speeches and booze. The chief seemed pleased. He made a speech. He said: “Some of us come to The Gazette and make it our life. Others pass by.” Mangan had passed by after three years, unable to face the continuing tedium of his daily assignments. His father helped him with the move, pulled strings, and got him a job on the Toronto Globe and Mail, which was considered the best newspaper in English Canada. I could have made the Globe my life, he thought, and retired like the chief with a matched set of luggage.

  He let his father go into the elevator before him. They went up to the fourth floor, the building beginning to shake as, below, the sudden rumble of presses began. The Final. So it was after one o’clock. He remembered hanging around the news desk until the first copies came off the presses, then going off with the other juniors to Slats’ Tavern for Molson beer and a supper of spaghetti, all of them coming in with their Finals under their arms. The Gazette men. The young reporters lived in an enclosed community of their own making. To them, all those outside their trade were civilians, news material to be written up and forgotten. Now, remembering those times, he realized that he had always thought of himself as different from the others. He was Mangan of The Gazette, but he was also James Mangan, a poet. He had not, like his father, made the paper his life. Others pass by.

  At the fifth floor his father stepped out of the elevator and with a sudden straightening of his shoulders walked briskly down the corridor. His father’s private office was partitioned off from the main floor of the City Room, which was almost empty now. A field of steel desks, the aisles strewn with paper detritus as after some rowdy sports event. At the big table, a frieze of reporters and deskmen waited for the Final to come up, some playing cards, some reading, some lolling and chatting. The entry of Mangan’s father was noticed by all, but acknowledged only by the senior few. “Hello, Pat. Hey, Pat,” as his father, affable yet distant, waved, then turned into his office.

  That morning Mangan had been reading of the entrance of an earlier Mangan into a newspaper. Duffy, editor of The Nation, wrote that James Clarence Mangan, one of the most frequent contributors to that journal, “stole into the editor’s office once a week to talk about literary projects, but if one of my friends appeared he took flight on the instant. The animal spirits and hopefulness of vigorous young men oppressed him and he fled from the admiration and sympathy of a stranger as others do from reproach and insult.”

  His father, who had never fled from a stranger, friendly or othe
rwise, went to his desk, where, ignoring the letters and messages stacked by his secretary, he picked up, one by one, the final editions of the last two days’ Gazettes, turning to the last page of each to check on the number, then expertly scanning key pages, non-institutional advertisements, sports, stock quotations. Above him, in old-fashioned brown pine frames, immemorialized in the lens wink of old Speed Graphic cameras, were high moments of his younger days: the English press lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, in white cloth caps and white duck shoes, posing on the shuffleboard deck of the Empress of Canada, with his father and old Scott McMurtry, the Gazette’s proprietor. His father at a banquet head table with Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune on his left and André Malraux on his right. In pride of place in the center of the display, his father’s favorite photograph, himself as a young reporter, smartly spiffed out in pinstripe suit, interviewing Roosevelt at the wartime Quebec conference.

  A throat clearing sounded at the office door. Mangan turned. Ritchie, black-jowled, looking rough as a bouncer, the usual dead White Owl cigar between his curiously ruby lips. “Hi, Pat. Hi, Jamie.”

  “Paul,” his father said pleasantly, looking up, then lowering his head again to scan a new page of newsprint. “Seems to have been pretty quiet over New Year’s.”

  “Dead,” Ritchie said, and then, as though he had committed a gaffe, looked straight at Mangan and, astonishingly, blushed. “Sorry. By the way, Jamie, I tried to get you in New York. Handelman said you’d gone back New Year’s Day.”

  Confused, he stared at Ritchie. “No, I went out to the Townships with Dad.”

  “You’ve been there since?”

  “Jesus,” Ritchie said. “You did hear the news?”

  “No, what?” his father said. “We didn’t even have a radio out there.”

  “Well”—Ritchie shuffled clumsily toward the desk, picked up one of the newspapers, and opened it at an inside page—“it happened day before yesterday. I’m awful sorry. We thought you’d know.” He handed the paper to Mangan.