Allegorizings

  It is a social as well as an economic revolution, but it does not strike me as a triumph of the nouveaux riches. It is more like an emancipation—more like Australia in the years when immigrants from continental Europe abruptly altered the mores of the country after the Second World War. The commuter suburbs of the new Ireland, with their trendy bistros, delicatessens, boutiques and garden centres, remind me of the burgeoning Sydney or Melbourne of those years, just as the proud new householders of Kildare and Kerry, with their sprinklers in the garden and Mercedes at the door, are like the Mediterranean entrepreneurs who so shook up the Aussies half a century ago.

  Tourism of course is mighty in Ireland (where isn’t it?), but it hasn’t overwhelmed the place. Places like the Ring of Kerry which were beset by jaunting-cars in Victorian times are congested with tour coaches now; ageing folk musicians haunt the locations once beloved of auntly water-colourists; but few places in Ireland have become unbearably touristy, and in many the garish corrosion of the trade does not show at all. A myriad developers cherish frightful plans for the exploitation of Ireland, but so far their most horrific schemes for visitor centres or theme parks have been thwarted.

  I suspect, all the same, that the Irish care more than they used to about what the world thinks of them. Keeping Ireland Tidy has become such a national preoccupation that when I drove into Aughrim, The Tidiest Town in Wicklow, I nearly turned and fled, so terrifyingly tidy was it. Some of the old reckless panache has undoubtedly been damped down, and it could hardly be otherwise, when Tidiness is all around you, and you have to skulk shamefaced in the street outside the pub if you want to have a smoke with your pint.

  I am not complaining. Plenty of Irish people are, of course—mourning lost traditions, apprehensive of future prospects, worried about drugs and crime, wary of dubious motives. “If you only knew,” they darkly say, when you ask about the manipulation of planning permissions, or the rising cost of living. During my visit the Irish Brewers’ Association claimed that pubs had sold seven million fewer pints in the previous month because of the smoking ban. The sudden new pace of life, together with a drastic decline in religious faith, has inevitably brought its own stresses to a populace once so easygoing; I was sad to see that the intercession books in Irish churches reveal so often family tensions or new fears—“Sacred Mercies pray for my son Kevin to be well and drive carefully on the road,” or “Holy Mother of God pray that Bridget and Kylie will be friends again.”

  Nevertheless, to an outsider from over the water what has happened to Ireland seems a twenty-first-century benediction. It is a spectacular display of materialism, indeed, but it is also a rare kind of epiphany: the moment when an entire nation, for so long a victim of cruel circumstance, is seizing history for itself at last, and starting all over again.

  THE DUBLIN SPIKE breaks every rule of Irish convention. It is far too tall for its setting, and makes no attempt to blend with its handsome Georgian environment. An Taisce, the National Trust of Ireland, calls it “sterile,” and so it is, in the sense that there is nothing fructifying to it. Yet to my mind it is absolutely right for its place and its moment, and its slender presence, erect above the urban scramble, seems properly to symbolize that constancy of the Irish spirit which amounts to—well, amounts to a soul.

  There is a pub in the village of Borris, in County Carlow, which is a more immediate exhibition of constancy. It has been run by members of the O’Shea family since 1934, and began as one of those small emporia, saloon, grocer and hardware store all in one, that used to be characteristic of the Irish country town. The O’Shea business has never been disconcerted by progress. It has developed into a mini-supermarket, but is true as ever to its origins: behind the bar counter are stacked ancient packets of nails, or wire, or candles, which look as though they have been there since the store began, but which are still for sale, so the present Mr. O’Shea assures me, “if any customer asks.” Children merrily sit on bar stools, ancients demolish Guinness and beef sandwiches, and if you happened to look in uninformed you might think nothing much had changed in Ireland since the 1950s.

  Not that nostalgia is rampant in this republic. Not a soul has spoken to me about any good old days. In the country towns especially, nevertheless, one feels the mellowed presence of the past. The suburbs burgeon all around, but in the town square the shops are still one and all family concerns, ornately announced, and in the hotel middle-aged ladies in flowered frocks still gossip hilariously over their coffees, below portraits of the heroes who lodged there long ago—Robert Emmet or Collins “The Big Feller,” Parnell Our Lost Leader, Daniel O’Connell the Liberator. The Catholic church of Our Lady of Mercy stands prosperously with its doors open, unfazed by scandals: the Protestant Church of St. John has been turned into a tourist office.

  For the remains have almost vanished of the Protestant Ascendancy, the old hegemony which did so much, for better or for worse, to create the modern legend of Irishness. If you want a last taste of it, try the village of Castletownshend, down on the Cork coast. There, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, three or four Anglo-Irish families were dominant, and their church is magnificently redolent of their presence—enormous plaques commemorate admirals, Etonians, Light Dragoons, Generals of the Bombay Army or aides-de-camp to Queen Victoria, and among them all is Edith Somerville of the famous literary partnership Somerville and Ross, who is described as Author, Artist, Musician and Master of Foxhounds, and who “played the organ in this church for 70 years.” It is only a shadow now, that once splendiferous society, but here and there one sees the burned-out hulk of a great mansion, deserted since the independence wars, and on the hill above Castletownshend still live the descendants of Admiral Boyle Somerville, Royal Navy, murdered by the IRA in his own house in 1936.

  But the twenty-first-century Irish appear to bear no grudges, and hardly seem to differentiate between the people of multitudinous nationalities who live and work all across the island. “Are you Lithuanian?” I asked a garage attendant at Ennis, in a wild guess. “No,” she replied without a trace of surprise, “I am Ukrainian, but my husband is Lithuanian.” Bewley’s coffee shop in Dublin, a holy of traditional holies, is given even more style nowadays by its dizzily cosmopolitan range of employees, and foreign students are enrolled in every kind of school, from majestic Trinity College, Dublin, to the shadiest backstreet academy of computer technology. Across the island towns and hamlets proudly announce improbable foreign connections—Tallow, for instance, is Host Town to Bolivia, Rathdrum to Bahrain.

  If there is one quality that has certainly survived the Irish transformation, it is the geniality of the people. They may be horribly ambitious in private, dubious of tactic and greedy, but in public they remain all Irish charm. “No problem,” is their happy watchword, and there is nowhere else in the world, I swear, where a foreigner can so soon be made to feel at home. Irish road signage is not the most lucid, but it is a pleasure to ask the way, anyway, for the sake of the conversation.

  O, wander this island for a week or two, through its legendary haze of mist and sunshine, fact and fiction, and wherever you go you will find the old Ireland living on! They are still singing, talking, drinking and playing the fiddle in the pubs of Galway—and if the weather is fine, still smoking on the sidewalks outside. . . . They are still making grand fruit-cake and marmalade to sell at the village hall of Roundwood, high in the Wicklow hills, and over the road in the church a sign still cries, “It’s me again, O Lord!” In enclaves of Cork as in Connemara the Gaelic language struggles gamely on.

  The Irish may be less rash and racy than they used to be, but the children’s playground by the Powerscourt waterfall offers such a marvellous variety of potential injuries as to make many a health and safety specialist give up in despair. I had a room in Ennis the other night which overlooked a school yard, and watching the boisterous shenanigans down there, which looked like innocent frolic but were probably laced with childish malice, was like watching a stage performance of
traditional Irish comedy.

  Thrift in Ireland used to mean a bag of coins under the bed, or a miser in a short story. It is now expressed in equities and mortgage rates, and the foreign money that pours into Ireland comes because it will be safe and multiply. But it seems to me miraculous that a people so eagerly assuming the prosaic responsibilities of our age should retain so much of the merriment of the age before last. How many other States, great or small, can be described as fun?

  I WENT BACK to the Dublin Spike before I left, and asked a passer-by of promisingly Irish appearance what she thought of the monument, and whether she considered it better represented the soil or the soul of Ireland. I had chosen her well, too, for she replied fluently, “It’s a meaningless device, that’s what it is, an awful waste of public money, a disgrace, so it is. And if I may say so, my dear, as to your second question, about the soil and the soul, that’s a foolish thing to ask—what would the one be without the other?” And away she briskly stepped, fiercely swinging her shopping bag, in the direction of the General Post Office.

  You’ve made that woman up, I hear you saying, that woman is pure invention. Ah yes, and so she is, so she is—but only just.

  A Man in a Wine Bar

  LONG AGO IN a Fleet Street wine bar, in London, a man named Caradog Prichard was pointed out to me as a curiosity. He was a well-respected Welsh journalist on the Daily Telegraph, I was told, but also an eminent poet in the Welsh language. He had left his traditional village in the mountains of north Wales when he was no more than a boy, they said, he had lived in London for many years, and his widowed mother had long been immured in a lunatic aslyum. They certainly sounded curious circumstances, but Prichard looked ordinary enough to me, middle-aged, amiable and evidently gregarious, and so far as I can remember I never thought of him again until years later I read his esoteric masterpiece Un Nos Ola Leuad—translated into English as One Moonlit Night.

  No book was ever truer to its author, no title ever more exact.

  THAT “TRADITIONAL VILLAGE in the mountains” they had mentioned in the wine bar was in fact the substantial slate quarrying town of Bethesda, where Prichard was born in 1904. His quarryman father was killed at work there when Caradog was five months old, leaving his mother to raise him and two elder brothers in conditions of harsh poverty. Prichard left the place when he was an adolescent, first to work as a journalist on local papers, later to go to London, and since the early 1920s his mother had been a patient in a mental hospital at Denbigh, dying there in 1954.

  Throw in two years of Army and Government service during and after the Second World War, and there you surely have a lifetime of embittering sadness, enough to make a neurotic misanthrope of a saint. Despite his sociable character, despite a happy marriage and success both as a journalist and as a poet, Prichard was tragically scarred within. He was plagued by suspicion that his father, who had been a strike-breaker in a prolonged and virulent quarry strike of the 1900s, had not been killed by accident, but had been murdered by resentful fellow workers. He became obsessed by the notion of suicide, and once tried to kill himself. He had bouts of heavy drinking. He was tormented by the thought of his poor mad mother struggling to keep her family clothed and fed. He was undoubtedly afflicted, like so many Welsh people who have chosen to live in exile, by pangs of homesickness and perhaps of guilt.

  Yet the miracle is this: that Un Nos Ola Leuad is essentially a sweet-natured book, seldom bitter, often funny, and in the end ambiguously serene. It was first published in 1961, long after the events it evokes, and long after I had seen Prichard in the wine bar. At that time established literary sensibilities in Wales were being cruelly knocked askew by the general debunking of old assumptions—the emergence of a Welsh avant-garde, in fact; but although Un Nos Ola Leuad recorded suicide, sexual perversions, insanity, adulteries and murder in that village in the mountains, the book was an instant success among Welsh readers of all sorts. It was essentially a kind book, and perhaps that is why.

  IT IS A sort of dream. Prichard himself described it as an “unreal picture, seen in the twilight and in the light of the moon,” and it is illuminated throughout by a vision which, like moonlight itself, seems disorienting, casting too many shadows, throwing too many structures into sudden relief. De Chirico might have illustrated it, with figures by the elder Brueghel.

  On the face of things the one logical thread of the work is provided by its narrative structure. It tells the story of one day and one night, and it is told by a single, unnamed voice. But it turns out to be far from simple, because although the voice is that of a boy, sometimes it apparently speaks with the experience of a grown man, and three times in the course of the book it is superseded by eerily vatic pronouncements of no explicable origin.

  These are couched in lofty poetical language, rather like divine interjections in Homer, and are all the more unsettling because at all other times the narrative voice is touchingly naïve. It expresses itself throughout not merely in a broad north Walian vernacular, the lingua franca of the Bethesda quarry communities, but also in the vocabulary and intonation of a child. He is a particularly engaging child, too, innocently ready for fun and harmless mischief but precociously tender in his sympathies. He is grateful for small kindnesses. He is devoted—perhaps over-devoted—to his widowed mother. There is something wistful about him, one feels, which sets him apart from his fellows, and gives to those Olympian interruptions a fateful suggestion of premonition.

  And it presently becomes clear that the premonition is of madness. The very first paragraph of the book suggests it, with an incongruous touch of the liturgical and something very strange about its tone of voice:

  I’ll go and ask Huw’s Mam if he can come out to play. Can Huw come out to play, O Queen of the Black Lake? No, he can’t, he’s in bed and that’s where you should be you little monkey, instead of going round causing a riot at this time of night. Where were you two yesterday making mischief and driving village folk out of their minds?

  WHERE THE TWO were yesterday is to be the ostensible theme of the book, but the village folk out of their minds and the Black Lake are to be with us to the end. In the first twenty-five pages of Un Nos we come across a sadistic schoolmaster, an epileptic having a fit, a woman threatening her husband with a bread knife, a corpse brought home from a madhouse, a woman committed to a madhouse, an eviction, rumours of sexual deviation, a woman locked in a coal shed, violent fisticuffs outside the Blue Bell, a couple fornicating in a wood, a horse dropping dead in its stable and somebody hanging himself in the lavatory. All this we witness through the sensibility of a small boy, more puzzled than aghast at what he sees, and when on page 25 he goes to bed on a bright moonlit night, tucked up with his Mam for comfort, God knows what we can expect in the morning.

  There’s a full moon tonight. Why won’t you let Huw come out to play, O Queen of the Black Lake?

  AS THE BOY wanders the town that day, he remembers events of his life: but as he wanders he grows older, too, and although he still speaks as a child he seems to see as an adult. Sometimes he is one age, sometimes he is another, and it is both as boy and as man that he recalls the tragedies of his childhood—the deaths of his two best friends, the loss of his mother when she is taken away to mental hospital, the cruel grotesqueries of village life, the poverty and the presence somewhere of that ominous lake. As we peer through the moonlight, we gradually realize that we are witnessing a slow descent into insanity.

  How much is real in the narrative, how much is hallucination, we never discover. When we set foot at last upon the banks of the Black Lake, we know we are in the company of a murderer, but how old he is, whether he is free or incarcerated, whether he is sane or crazy, just about to enter an abyss or recently escaped from one—all these questions are left so mistily unresolved that we wonder whether the author himself, in his unnamed persona as the Bethesda child, or as that unremarkable customer in the Fleet Street wine bar, ever knew the answers.

  And yet . . . I come back
to Un Nos Ola Leuad time and again not for the tragedy of it, or even the haunting mystery, but for the sweet pity of it all.

  The Nijinski of Grammar

  TO MY MIND every letter of the alphabet, every punctuation mark, has its own resonances. The letter b, for example, is especially suited to abuse—the words “bastard,” “blithering,” “brute,” “bitch,” “bully,” are just made to be blurted out with blustering bravado. And surely nothing could be more absolutely final than a full stop—a period to Americans—with no compromising tail or ingratiating squiggle to weaken its decision. Be off with you, you beastly boy, booms the letter b. Right, that’s it, clearly declares the full stop, end of story.

  The most sensitive of these grammatical symbols, and the most crudely threatened by ignorant fashion, is the exclamation mark, as graceful in allegory as it is in appearance. Lily-like is how the exclamation mark appears to me, sensual, fastidious, but every year fewer practitioners dare to employ it. It is true that its purposes have long been cheapened, so that it is nicknamed “the scream,” is splashed across the pages of schoolgirl love letters, and is a stock-in-trade of satirists. Throughout the English-speaking world editors routinely remove exclamation marks, as though they are signs of illiteracy, or at least insults to the house style.

  But in my opinion this elegant device is one of the glories of literary usage. In some languages letters mutate to conform with the word that follows them. The exclamation mark remains the same whatever the thought it is illustrating, but its meaning miraculously shifts. It is like a written tone of voice. It can be, of course, exclamatory, but it can also magically signify humour, horror, sarcasm and a host of other emotions. It is, one might say, the Nijinski of grammar!