THE BAR HAD A FIREPLACE—A mean bundle of misshapen fieldstone rocks seemingly dumped in the corner of the room. But at least it had a fire in it, which was something of a welcome sight on that unusually chilly and blustery market/day evening in Bantry. Not much of a fire, though—it crackled and hissed and nudged out reluctant curlicues of smoke and halfhearted insipid-colored flames. The ones you expect to vanish any moment and be replaced by big black sighs of soot. Not that I cared really what they did. I’d come in with a “by your leave, good landlord” just to use the facilities and then make a hasty getaway before the market traffic clogged the winding road all the way back to Glengarriff.
But, of course, things didn’t quite work out that way. They rarely do. The facilities were fine…well no, actually, that’s a downright lie. The facilities were unbelievably awful and enough to put you off your corned beef and cabbage for life, but when in need, etc., etc.
I was heading back to the main door when I realized that the room with the fire in it, which I would swear was empty when I’d arrived a few minutes earlier, was now occupied by the oddest trio of gentlemen it has ever been my good fortune to meet on a Bantry market day. Or any other day in Bantry, for that matter. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.
Their appearance and demeanor, to put it mildly, were utterly contradictory to the spirit and scope of their utterances. The small one by the fire, who seemed lost in his own coal-warmed world, suddenly gave out a sonorous bellow like an angry walrus. The other two didn’t seem the least surprised by either the nature or volume of the explosive outburst. Even the barman seemed unperturbed. In fact he seemed blankly glass-eyed—almost taxidermied—until someone ordered drinks. Then he merely looked up from his studious pulling of a pint of the black stuff, smiled in a slightly doleful way, winked at me, shook his balding head, and lowered it again to supervise the slow filling of the glass.
The man by the fire then gave a second, less emphatic bellow and slowly looked around the room, as if to ascertain who was emitting such odd, nonverbal utterances. The other two men ceased their whispered chatter and turned to watch the smaller man.
“Y’see—dammit—the problem is…NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO WRITE ANYMORE! They’re either trying desperately to be different so their stuff comes out all self-conscious and self-important…or they’re imitating other writers—or a pastiche of other writers—they become sycophants of style like they’ve been on one of those asinine creative writing courses…Couldn’t tell a decent seanachai tale to save their…male appendages. Assumin’ they have any…”
“Ah, but—” started the middle gentleman, his face rosy and his whiskey nose resplendently purple.
“No, no, no!” said the third, sprawling in a small wooden chair that looked dangerously close to imminent implosion. I began to sense I had emerged into a minor maelstrom of misunderstanding.
But the grammar-garbling gentleman by the fire would not be stopped. In a voice I can liken only to that of a frenetic Yorkshire terrier on an acid trip gone wrong, and with his fingers skittering nervously like trapped mice, he ignored his companions, or at least he silenced them by loudly repeating his last phrase before the interruptions had barely begun: “…ASININE CREATIVE WRITING COURSES…” He paused long enough to regain the attention of the other two (with not a scintilla of pleasantly congenial propinquity) and then continued: “I think it was that American writer George Kerouac…”
“Jack,” mumbled the man in the middle.
“Beg pardon?”
“Jack…His name was Jack Kerouac.”
“You sure?”
“Sure he’s sure and so am I. Jack was his name,” said the sprawling man. “What’s y’ point?”
“MY POINT IS”—the little man by the fire repeated his attention-grabbing, capitalized semishout—“my point is that Mr. Kerouac—Jack or George—whatever—once declared that when you write you should forget all rules, literary styles, and other pretensions and write as if you were the first person ever to live on earth!”
“He said that, did he?” said the man in the middle after the three had sat through a mutually meditative pause in the proceedings.
“Yes. He did. And I think he’s definitely got a point…”
“Ow!” shouted the sprawling man. The middle man chuckled. The man by the fire looked at the sprawling man.
“What’s wrong with you then?”
The sprawling man couldn’t resist a little jesty pun: “I just got your point…and it hurts!” He laughed at his own wit, and the middle man joined in. The man by the fire was not amused. He glowered with an almost reptilian intensity: “Waste o’ my bloody breath, w’ you two. Here I am tryin’ to add a little elucidation to your lives and all you can do is josh around like a couple o’ bloody school kids! You’re both sufferin’ badly from bovine spongiform encephalopathy—otherwise known as ‘mad cow disease’—otherwise known as holes in y’ tiny brains!” He looked as sad as a soggy crouton in a bowl of cold, greasy soup.
The man in the middle eased forward, as if about to rise to collect another round of drinks. Then he seemed to change his mind and adopted a ruminative tone: “I assume you’ve heard what little Truman Capote once said of Kerouac’s fiction: ‘That’s not writing—that’s typing’! Anyway…I think many of our finest Irish writers have some of that sense…writing as if you were seeing things new…for the first time. And even Welshmen do too! People like Dylan Thomas—oh, good lord—he must have really been an Irishman with all that paddywackery poetry in his veins and that rumbly humor and that rhythm with his words…and that lovely chocolaty voice—I can hear him now reading from his Under Milk Wood. Y’remember how it goes—‘It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. Ah. Such lovely stuff.’”
“Oh yes…now that’s language indeed…,” said the sprawling man. “Old Dylan could make changin’ gloppy motor oil sound as sensual as suckin’ on a fine, fat peach!”
The mirthless man by the fire nodded slowly: “Y’see what I mean—or what George Kerouac…”
“Jack” (both companions, in unison).
“Okay. JACK Kerouac…meant…by sounding like you were seeing things as if you were the first person ever to live on earth.”
“And despite being a Welshman too…,” said the middle man.
“Who? Kerouac?”
“No—Dylan Thomas.”
“Yes—but he was most famous in America,” said the sprawling man, whose chair seemed ready to fly apart as he leaned his huge frame back on it.
“Oh, yes, America. Land of the biggest megawattage-celebrity-bore-writers…”
“Oh—and pray—who might they be?” asked the man in the middle in a pseudo-sagacious tone and with an ironic disassembled grin.
“The ones with that fake display of arrogant adolescence despite the onset of early senility—and then the ones wrapped in teetering naffery with egos as big as pumpkins but as frail as quail eggs—and then the bloody smoothies…the ones scribbling style over substance…the neurotic, alcoholic, depressive, dweebish, affected, academic, self-adoring, and self-hating hedonists parading and preening in front of their own self-made mirrors and giving their creative writing tuition classes for gooey-eyed stargazers and literary groupies. All these godawful, redolently gaseous, hyper-hypocritical blobs of loopy loquaciousness and blubbery bombast…”
“Like?”
“Like? Well, for example, John Updike, whatshisname Cheever, Bellow, Sallinger, Irving, etc., etc.”
“Ah—the Lords of Language…,” said the sprawling man, who had now righted himself, possibly due to the ominous warning creaks of his frail chair.
“But even the big names can have a bit of fun trashing each other,” said the man in the middle. “Salman Rushdie said he thought Updike’s novel Terrorist was ‘beyond awful’ and that ‘he should stay in his little parochial neighborhood and write about wife swapping’ because it’s all he could do. And Mailer—The Late Big Norman—now there’s one who seemed to enjoy being a cantankerous human being and writer. He said Saul Bellow’s style was ‘self-willed and unnatural’ and that James Baldwin was ‘far too charming to be a major writer.’ The old bugger also offended every woman writer around. He said something about there won’t be any really decent female writers until hookers start telling their true tales. Or something equally crude like that…but it was typical Mailer. Like when he said ‘piety and prudery take all the art out of true thinking.’”
“Yeah, but there was another critic,” said the sprawling man, now upright, “who the heck was it, anyway. He picked on Bellow too…Described one of his books as ‘the dark grapplings one associates with Russian-Jewish authors transported to America where they become hilarious viewed through the lens of college politics and batty girlfriends instead of peasant uprisings.’ Oh, and then he said there’s no really good feuds between writers like there used to be because there’s no really good writing—no good stories, with a beginning, a middle, and an end—anymore! Hemingway—that great old self-promoter and chest thumper—said ‘the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector.’ That’s why he shot himself, I suppose…an old man churning out too much sh…”
“Good point,” mumbled the man in the middle.
“All carrot and no stick…”
“What?”
“All carr—”
“Yeah. I heard that bit. What’s your point?”
“Still bloody sharp—just like it was a minute ago—and it’s obvious, I should have thought!”
“Oh, you’re on a real roller tonight…”
The literary wrangle did indeed seem to be getting a little heavy-browed fractious among these three odd characters, and I wondered if it was indeed time for me to be rolling home. But before I could empty my glass and move on, the barman leaned over and half whispered—“So what d’y think to our three seanachai then?”
“These are seanachai—storytellers?”
“Oh yes indeed they are—three of the best. You should be here on a night when they’re doing one of their seisuins.”
But I was not to hear their stories that night. Instead, I kept exchanging the occasional knowing nod and wink with the barman while these three flamboyantly erudite pontificators and passionate eccentrics continued their lambasting of literature and writers in general. I suppose I should have moved on, but Bantry’s not known for its wild nightlife, and anyhow, this impromptu show of mixed misunderstandings was just too good to miss.