The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  “So you are Jim Mangan,” the stranger said.

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Michael Mangan,” the stranger said, and stared at Mangan, seeming surprised by his surprise. “Dinny told you nothing, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He’s close, all right, that lad. It’s a good thing, I suppose.”

  “I thought you were dead,” Mangan said. “In fact, I was told you were dead.”

  “I am dead,” the stranger said. “Dead to the world.”

  As he spoke, he laughed, and Mangan saw that there was a gap in his mouth in the same place where he had lost his own tooth. “I have been dead now, for the past six years.” He shook his head, as though marveling at what he saw.

  “You’re the first,” he said. “The first to know I’m alive. And isn’t that poetic justice? My spitting image. Come on.” He put his arm around Mangan’s shoulder. “Let’s go up.”

  The two sheep dogs, obedient to their master’s every move, rose and followed them into the keep. In the dank lower chamber amid the nettles, thistles, and sheep droppings the stranger, loosing his fraternal grip on Mangan, went to a weed-filled opening in the wall and, firmly grasping a bunch of nettles, pulled them aside. “Through here,” he said. “Mind the nettles. They discourage any wee boys who might come this way.”

  The opening, as Mangan climbed through it, revealed itself as the doorway to a stairway which wound round up stone steps. The dogs followed them up the stairs until they came into the second-floor chamber by a narrow door opening similar to the one on the ground floor.

  Here, the first thing Mangan noticed was that there was no proper roof, but a large green tarpaulin, very worn and stained, was stretched tight over the place where the original roof had collapsed. This tarpaulin produced a sail-like flapping sound which, heard against the crash of waves below the tower, gave the impression that they were not on land but at sea. The room itself was a medieval shell, with its great fireplace still intact. The stranger cooked his meals in it, as evidenced by the burning turf fire, with two iron pots and an old kettle suspended over it by an iron bar and chains. There was little furniture in the room: a large, homemade table piled with books and sheets of paper. There was also a chair made from wooden crates, and on the floor a boxlike bed, like a low coffin, in which there rested incongruously a bright-orange nylon sleeping bag. The walls carried no picture or ornament but were lined with orange crates converted to bookcases, containing mostly paperback books. “My home and my castle,” the stranger said. “I wish to God I’d known you were coming, for I’d have borrowed, begged, or stole to get you a drink to mark this occasion. Our meeting is a cause for celebration. I will tell you why later on.”

  “I have drink in my car,” Mangan said, remembering. “Pity I left it there.”

  “No pity,” the stranger said. “It will not take me long to fetch it up for us.”

  “But I left the car down by the jetty at the end of the road. That’s about an hour’s walk.”

  “For you, my lad, not for me. I have shortcuts. Are you hungry? There is bread there and cold lamb. And eggs in the bowl. Is your car locked?”

  “No.”

  “Where is the drink?”

  “It’s in a plastic bag on the front seat. Shall I come with you?”

  “No, no, you’d only slow me up.” The stranger beckoned his dogs. “I’ll not be long. Eat something, now. I’ll be back directly.”

  And suddenly, like a magician, his double disappeared through the dark opening, the dogs at his heels, leaving Mangan alone in the chamber. He turned and walked to the slitted window and looked down at the grassy courtyard, seeing the man emerge from the keep, buckling his slicker about his neck, the dogs vaulting the wall, using the stepping-stone. Is that the way I move? Is that my walk? He saw his older self go swiftly up the steep path and watched his walk until he disappeared from view from the narrow window.

  Above, drops of rain pelted the taut surface of the tarpaulin, making a loud tattoo in the dark chamber. Mangan, moving about, found a stack of children’s exercise books on the table and beside them a dictionary and some old books in Gaelic. He moved to the makeshift bookcases and read name after name with rising pleasure: Marvell, Donne, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot; there were also several poetry anthologies, including the Faber Book of Modern Verse. There were paperbacks of Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev. There were histories of Ireland, books on the Irish language, Joyce’s Portrait, Camus’s The Plague. There were novels by Lawrence and Hardy and the collected essays of Swift, all of them titles he would be pleased to see on his own shelves. To find them in this remote place, the makeshift library of his mysterious double, filled him with sudden, enormous pride. This was the true relative he had come three thousand miles to find. He went to the table and picked up an exercise book off the neat stack piled there. He opened it and saw the handsome script. He realized that the script was not italic as he had thought, but closer to uncial, and that the book contained verses in Latin.

  He put the book down and picked up another, which was not in Latin but in the Irish language. This was obviously a workbook, with verses scratched out and written anew. Above, the rain thundered on the tarpaulin roof. He shut the books and rearranged them neatly, so that his host would not know they had been disturbed. Perhaps his double wrote in the Irish language and therefore was not widely known? To have opened his book without his permission now seemed a base act. Better to let him introduce his poems himself.

  Mangan went back and sat by the dying fire, putting fresh pieces of turf on the embers. Here at land’s end, a man amid his books in a ruined Norman tower, living like a hermit writing his verse. He felt elated as though he had stumbled on a treasure. There was a loaf of brown bread, and suddenly ravenous, he cut two slices, stuffing the bread into his mouth, crumbs spilling onto the dirty stone floor. He sat, watching the turf catch and burn, its brown hairy fibers singeing like an animal’s hide. The rain ceased as swiftly as it had begun and the slatted window filled with sunlight. He went to look out. In the kaleidoscope of Irish weather, the sky was now free of clouds. Gulls flew in lazy parabolas over the white cliffs. Who was Michael Mangan, and why was he hiding here under a false name?

  And then, startling, as though he had asked the question aloud, a voice called up, “Are you still there? I’m back.” And he heard footsteps in the winding stone stair. His older double entered the room, holding the plastic bag with its gin bottles, the dogs slinking at his heels and going almost furtively to lie near the fire. “That wasn’t long, was it?” his double said as he hung his black slicker on a stick stuck between the stones of the wall, and pulled off, at last, his low-brimmed old felt hat, revealing that his graying hair had receded far up his forehead, giving him a noble brow. So my hair will probably go like that, Mangan thought, as his host went to the corner of the chamber and produced two enameled tin mugs, into which he poured stiff measures of gin. “Did you ever think you would become a priest?” he asked surprisingly, as he handed one of the cups over.

  “No, I was never religious.”

  “Nor was I. Our strain in the Mangan family are all without the consolations of religion. Hell fire isn’t what we’re afraid of. I’ll tell you what we’re afraid of. We’re afraid that we’ll be forgotten. Am I right?”

  He smiled at Mangan. “What I meant about being a priest was that you’ve come here for my confession.” He smelled the gin in his cup, then drank. “God, that’s good. It’s been a long time between drinks. Sit down, will you?”

  He sat himself on some sacks by the fire, drawing his old Wellington boots up under his chin, rocking to and fro, savoring the gin. Then he took out Dinny’s envelope and pulled from it several sheets, handwritten on both-sides of the paper. “I have a full report on you here,” he said. “He must have been a long while writing it. So Kathleen has been your downfall.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what Dinny says. And although he’s my son,
I wouldn’t say he has it in him to invent a yarn like that.” He stared at Mangan. “God, you’re the image of me when I was your age. As I was of my uncle Dan and Uncle Dan was of James Clarence himself. How much do you know about all this?”

  “Not anything, really.”

  “This letter says you found a photo in Canada. Do you have that photo on you by any chance?”

  “Of course,” Mangan said, and took out the daguerreotype, passing it over to his double, who took it almost with reverence and went with it to the window, holding it to the light. He said nothing, for what seemed a long time, and when he turned back to Mangan, he seemed unsteady, as though he had experienced the exact feeling Mangan had when first he looked at the photograph.

  “My God,” he said, “where did you get it, did you say?”

  “It was among my grandfather’s papers. He emigrated to Canada in 1892. His people came from Drishane and he had a book by a Father Drinan claiming that Mangan had a son who settled in Drishane. My grandfather believed he was a descendant of that son. Look at the back of the picture. There are initials and a date.”

  Mangan watched his double turn over the daguerreotype and saw, with amazement, that he made a grimace of surprise which was just like one he would have made himself. “My God,” his double said again. “J.M. That would be a couple of years before he died. You know, don’t you, that he was not christened Clarence? He began to use it as a sort of pen name, at first. He signed his lighter pieces as Clarence. You know that?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Of course you do.” His double drank the remainder of the gin in his cup. “Of course, you’ve read the biographies.” He picked up the daguerreotype again. “The trouble is, Drinan’s is the only one which claims that Mangan married. And it’s largely discredited. Or was, until now.” He held up the photograph. “This changes things, I’d say.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I also found a photograph, the only known photograph of James Clarence Mangan. And it is a photograph of this man, taken around the same period. And if your grandfather had this photograph in his possession, a daguerreotype, an original, the only one of its kind, then it must have been passed on to him through the Mangan connection. The link is forged. Wait till I show you.”

  He went to his shelves and eased out a large volume in a handsome binding. “When I saw this in Trinity College Library in Dublin I promptly pinched it.”

  Mangan opened to the title page and read:

  TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

  A History

  By J. K. McManus and Prof. R. McHugh

  “As you’ll see, it’s a book about the university itself. You know Mangan worked in the library there for a time. As a cataloguer. And he haunted the place all his life. Now, look at this.”

  He opened the book to a plate. There was a soft-focus photograph of library stacks, with, before them, four men facing the camera. Two of the men sat on high library stools, one stood, and the fourth man was perched halfway up a ladder in the background. The inscription read:

  PLATE XI

  This early calotype photograph shows the library’s “Fagel” room in 1846. Of interest are these habitués of the room including T. Stubbs-Heath, the antiquarian and historian (with beard). Extreme left is the historian J. R. Mitchel. The man on the ladder is believed to be the poet James Clarence Mangan. The fourth man is not identified.

  “Here,” said his double. “This will help you see better.” He took from its green leather carrying case an old-fashioned magnifying glass, which Mangan then focused on the photograph. The man on the ladder wore a long shapeless cloak and peered nervously at the camera. At once Mangan had the sensation of seeing himself in fancy dress. The magnification of the glass showed the photograph’s soft-focus surface as grainy and strange. Nevertheless, the face, purged of its normal lines, stared back at him large and familiar. It was his face. It was also the face of the man in the daguerreotype. It was also the face of his host. Mangan took up the daguerreotype again and scanned both photographs with the magnifying glass. The hair was the same length in both. The hairline was the same. “Eighteen forty-six,” Mangan said. “This picture in the library was taken one year before the daguerreotype picture.”

  “Three years before he died,” his double said.

  Their eyes met and held. In the silence, broken by the distant crash of waves, a crow flying over the tower began its loud harsh call. “Kah! Kah! Kaaah! Kah!” They looked into each other’s face as a man will look at his image in a mirror, searching for its secret.

  “It’s like two pieces of a puzzle that fit together,” his double said. “The photo in the book and that photo of yours. Until now, I still had a little bit of doubt. What if I just happened to look like Mangan? But now you’ve brought the transatlantic evidence, so to speak. And not only that, there’s your own face. My face. And you write poetry, I am told?”

  “I did, once.”

  “I know what you mean,” his double said. “I stopped myself, for a while. I lost heart. But now I am back at the writing. It is the only thing left for me. And I know now it was always the only thing.”

  The crow, wheeling high over the tower, cried, “Kah! Kah! Kaaaah!” The sound seemed derisive. “And what about James Clarence Mangan’s poetry?” Mangan asked. “Do you like his work?”

  His double smiled. “I know. Times change and tastes change with them. But he has a certain power. And he’s remembered.”

  “Remembered,” Mangan said. “But for what? Certain poets are remembered for the lives they led, not for their poems.”

  “His poems are remembered.” His double poured two more drinks. “Of course the life was colorful. He was a doper and a drunkard and died a pauper, alone in a charity ward. He went to an early grave. But that’s all part of the mold, isn’t it? Remember Joyce said that Mangan’s was an exemplary life for a certain type of artist.”

  “The poète maudit,” Mangan said. “And he was the prototype of that sort of poet. Before Baudelaire or Rimbaud. Before the term itself was invented. Yet he wasn’t a great poet like Rimbaud or Baudelaire.”

  “But he is remembered,” his double said. “His statue stands to this day in Saint Stephen’s Green in Dublin. There are books written about him, as you know. And his poems are still read. Children learn them in National School. In the long run, what else matters? Whether he was a saint or a wastrel is secondary, I say. What counts is what a poet writes. And today, thanks to you and to that photograph, I feel certain at last that I am his blood and his genes carried into this generation. As you are yourself.” He smiled and raised his tin cup in salute, then asked, “By the way, where did you get that bash in the face?”

  “Two characters attacked me in a pub in Bantry.”

  “Did they knock that tooth out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Astonishing,” said his double. “I lost my own upper tooth in a brawl in Bantry. I was drunk. Is drink a trouble for you?”

  Mangan shook his head.

  “But you are a maudit? You must be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we all are. You and me and my uncle Dan, all the way back to James Clarence himself. It’s in our blood. Are women your trouble?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Tell me about your uncle Dan. He was a poet, wasn’t he?”

  “He was, God help him.” His double rose, went to the bookshelves, and took down a book. It was in a Victorian binding on cloth boards, with a fading gilt-scrolled cover. The title page read:

  TALES OF THE WEST

  by

  Daniel James Mangan

  P. Healy, Booksellers & Printers

  Eyre Square

  Galway 1891

  Mangan turned the page and saw a listing of some fifty poems. “They will not be to your liking,” his double said. “Although in their day they had a fair following. I remember at home in Duntally I found a lot of write-ups from the newspapers at the time this book appeared. Good notices, most of t
hem. He was a contemporary of Wilde and Synge. He claimed to have met Wilde and to have been friendly with Synge. Maybe true, maybe not. He was a bit of an embroiderer when he told a story.”

  Mangan looked at a verse, then read it aloud:

  “Thou sayest that fate is frosty nothing,

  But love the flame of souls that are.

  Two spirits approaching and at their touching,

  Behold an everlasting star.”

  His double smiled. “Yes, I know. As I said before, times change and tastes change with them. But I’m afraid that if Uncle Dan is remembered at all, it’s not for his poems. Did Dinny tell you the story?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Uncle Dan’s main claim to fame, I suppose, is that, because of his death, a man was hanged in Cork in 1916.”

  “Nineteen-sixteen. That was the time of the Troubles, wasn’t it? Was it the British who hanged him?”

  “It was the British, all right, but the man was hanged for ordinary murder. It was drink that did it. Uncle Dan was a heavy drinker with a bad tongue on him. It seems he was drinking in a pub down in the markets in Cork and he insulted some character, who asked him to step outside. Well, when he went out into the markets, this other man followed with a friend, and when Uncle Dan saw there were two of them and that they were both coming at him, he ran over to a butcher’s stall and picked up a meat cleaver, thinking to frighten them off. But they were mad drunk, those fellows. They grabbed the meat cleaver off Uncle Dan, and then one of them swung at him with it and cut his throat from ear to ear. Butchered him like a pig.”

  In the silence that followed, the crow cried: “Kah! Kah! Kaaah!” as in terror at this news.