Once again I was without a job. Like the old men whose landladies and daughters-in-law turned them out in the mornings, I made the Public Library my headquarters, and continued to read through the advertisements for a smart boy, though I realized that I was ceasing to be a boy and would probably never be smart. Then I went out and wandered aimlessly about the town in hope of meeting someone who would talk to me, and even maybe give me a cigarette. It was a dreary existence, because Father kept on asking what I was going to do with myself, and I had no notion. It was no use telling him that eventually I hoped to find a job that would suit my peculiar brand of education or meet some rich girl who would recognize my talents and keep me in decent comfort till I established myself. She didn’t have to be very rich; my needs were simple; only a trousers without a patch on the seat of it, so that I could be seen with her without embarrassment, and an occasional packet of cigarettes. Father, having returned from the War with a disability pension to add to his service pension, was past arguing with – a man who had really set himself up for life!
It was a period of political unrest and, in a way, this was a relief, because it acted as a safety valve for my own angry emotions. Indeed, it would be truer to say that the Irish nation and myself were both engaged in an elaborate process of improvization. I was improvizing an education I could not afford, and the country was improvizing a revolution it could not afford. In 1916 it had risen to a small, real revolution with uniforms and rifles, but the English had brought up artillery that had blown the centre of Dublin flat, and shot down the men in uniform. It was all very like myself and the Christian Brothers. After that, the country had to content itself with a make-believe revolution, and I had to content myself with a make-believe education, and the curious thing is that it was the make-believe that succeeded.
The elected representatives of the Irish people (those who managed to stay out of gaol) elected what they called a government, with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs that tried in vain to get Woodrow Wilson to see it, a Ministry of Finance that exacted five to ten pounds from small shopkeepers who could ill afford it, a Ministry of Defence that tried to buy old-fashioned weapons at outrageous prices from shady characters, and a Ministry of Home Affairs that established courts of justice with part-time Volunteer policemen and no gaols at all.
It all began innocently enough. People took to attending Gaelic League concerts at which performers sang ‘She Is Far from the Land’, recited ‘Let Me Carry Your Cross for Ireland, Lord’, or played ‘The Fox Chase’ on the elbow pipes, and armed police broke them up. I remember one that I attended in the town park. When I arrived, the park was already occupied by police, so after a while the crowd began to drift away towards the open country up the river. A mile or so up it re-assembled on the river-bank, but by this time most of the artistes had disappeared. Somebody who knew me asked for a song. At fourteen or fifteen I was delighted by the honour and tried to sing in Irish a seventeenth-century outlaw song about ‘Sean O’Dwyer of the Valley’. I broke down after the first verse – I always did break down whenever I had to make any sort of public appearance because the contrast between what was going on in my head and what was going on in the real world was too much for me – but it didn’t matter much. At any moment the police might appear, and this time there could be real bloodshed. It was sheer obstinacy that had driven respectable people to walk miles just to attend a concert they were not very interested in, and they paid their sixpences and went home, rightly feeling that they were the real performers.
It was the same at Mass on Sunday. The bishop, Daniel Coholan – locally known as ‘Danny Boy’ – was a bitter enemy of all this pretence, and every Sunday we had to be ready for a diatribe at Mass. It was as upsetting as discovering that the Invisible Presences still regarded us as traitors for, though I knew that Ellen Farrell and her husband had defied the Church in Parnell’s day, I had had no expectation of ever having to do so. The priest would turn on the altar or ascend the pulpit and start the familiar rigmarole about ‘defiance of lawful government’, and some young man would rise from his seat and move into the nave, genuflect and leave the church. Suddenly every eye would be turned on him, and even the priest would fall silent and wait for the interruption to end. Then there would be a shuffling of feet in one of the aisles, and a girl would rise, genuflect and leave as well. Sometimes this went on for minutes till a considerable group had left. They stood and talked earnestly in the chapel yard, all of them declared rebels, some perhaps marked down for assassination, till the priest finished his harangue and they went back. Naturally, I always joined them, hoping for a nod or a smile from one of them.
It was childish, of course, but so was everything else about the period, like the little grocery shop you saw being repainted and the name on the fascia board changed from ‘J. Murphy’ to ‘Sean O’Murchadha’. One can still almost date that generation by its Liams, Seans and Peadars. I suspect that in those few years more books were published in Ireland than in any succeeding twenty years. Not good books, God knows, any more than the little papers that kept on appearing and being suppressed were good papers. But they expressed the mind of the time. One paper I still remember fondly because it proposed that English as a ‘secondary’ language be dropped in favour of French. In those days it struck me as an excellent idea. The impossible, and only the impossible, was law. It was in one way a perfect background for someone like myself who had only the impossible to hope for.
Then the real world began to catch up with the fantasy. The Lord Mayor, Thomas MacCurtain, was murdered by English police in his own home before the eyes of his wife; another Lord Mayor, Terence MacSwiney, was elected in his place and promptly arrested. He went on hunger strike and died in Brixton Gaol. Mother and I were among those who filed past his coffin as he lay in state in the City Hall in his volunteer uniform; the long, dark, masochistic face I had seen only a few months before as he chatted with Corkery by the New Bridge. Years later I talked with a little country shopkeeper from North Cork who had organized a company of Volunteers in his home town, and been so overawed by the tall, dark young man who cycled out from the city to inspect them that he was too shy to ask where MacSwiney was spending the night. Long after, cycling home himself, he saw someone lying in a field by the roadside and, getting off, found MacSwiney asleep in the wet grass with nothing but an old raincoat round him. That vision of MacSwiney had haunted him through the years of disillusionment.
Curfew was imposed, first at ten, then at five in the afternoon. The bishop excommunicated everyone who supported the use of physical force, but it went on just the same. One night shots were fired on our road and a lorry halted at the top of the square. An English voice kept on screaming hysterically ‘Oh, my back! my back!’ but no one could go out through the wild shooting of panic-stricken men. Soon afterwards the military came in force, and from our back door we saw a red glare mount over the valley of the city. For hours Father, Mother and I took turns at standing on a chair in the attic, listening to the shooting and watching the whole heart of the city burn. Father was the most upset of us, for he was full of local pride, and ready to take on any misguided foreigner or Dublin jackeen who was not prepared to admit the superiority of Cork over all other cities. Next morning, when I wandered among the ruins, it was not the business district or the municipal buildings that I mourned for, but the handsome red-brick library that had been so much a part of my life from the time when as a small boy I brought back my first Western adventure story over the railway bridges. Later I stood at the corner by Dillon’s Cross where the ambush had been and saw a whole block of little houses demolished by a British tank. One had been the home of an old patriot whom my grandparents called ‘Brienie Dill’. A small, silent crowd was held back by soldiers as the tank lumbered across the pavement and thrust at the wall until at last it broke like pie crust and rubble and rafters tumbled. It made a deep impression on me. Always it seemed to be the same thing: the dark, shrunken face of MacSwiney in the candle-light and the wall that burst at the thrust of the tank; ‘the splendour falls’ and ‘There is no such thing in business as an out-and-out free gift’. It was like a symbolic representation of what was always happening to myself, and it seemed as though Ireland did not stand a much better chance. The material world was too strong for both of us.
All the same I could not keep away from Ireland, and I was involved in most of the activities of that imaginative revolution – at a considerable distance, of course, because I was too young, and anyway, I had Father all the time breathing down my neck. In the absence of proper uniform our Army tended to wear riding breeches, gaiters, a trench coat and a soft hat usually pulled low over one eye, and I managed to scrape up most of the essential equipment, even when I had to beg it, as I begged the pair of broken gaiters from Tom MacKernan. I conducted a complicated deal for the Ministry of Defence and bought a French rifle from a man who lived close to Cork Barrack, though, when. I had risked a heavy sentence by bringing it home down my trouser leg, all the time pretending I had just met with a serious accident, it turned out that there wasn’t a round of ammunition in Ireland to fit it. When the British burned and looted Cork and encouraged the slum-dwellers to join in the looting, I was transferred to the police and put to searching slums in Blarney Lane for jewellery and furs. In a back room in Blarney Lane we located a mink coat which the woman who lived there said had just been sent her by her sister in America. Being a polite and unworldly boy of seventeen, I was quite prepared to take her word for it, but my companion said she hadn’t a sister in America and, shocked by her untruthfulness, I brought the coat back to its rightful owners. That she might have needed it more than they didn’t occur to me; I remembered only that I was now a real policeman, and acted as I felt a good policeman should act. When Belfast was boycotted during the anti-Catholic pogroms, I was sent with one or two others to seize a load of Belfast goods at the station where I had worked a year before. The Belfast goods mysteriously turned out to be a furniture van, but you couldn’t take me in like that. Belfast businessmen were very cunning and besides I had my orders. So we made the poor van driver and his horse trudge all the way to Glanmire, miles down the river, and only when he opened it up did we realize that it contained nothing but the furniture of some Catholic family flying from the pogroms.
It was in this atmosphere that I produced my second work, which – as may be understood – was a translation into Irish of Du Bellay’s sonnet, ‘Heureux Qui Comme Ulysse’, well spoken of in George Wyndham’s chatty book on the Pleaide. I was probably deeply moved by Du Bellay’s sentiments for, being a great wanderer in my own imagination, I took a deep interest in the feelings of returned travellers. It is probably a recurring fantasy of the provincial, for one friend whom I made later – the most conscientious of officials – never read anything but sea stories, and from Corkery’s novel, The Threshold of Quiet – itself full of sailors and ships – I can still quote his excellent translation of an inferior French sonnet: ‘Returned at last from lands we yearn to know.’
But this sonnet of mine is another triumph of mind over matter and, so far as I know, unique in literature, because it is a translation from one language the author didn’t know into another that he didn’t know – or at best, knew most imperfectly. This was obscured when the poem was published in one of the political weeklies that were always appearing and disappearing as the English caught up with them because both languages were even more unknown to editor and printer; and the only thing that could be perceived from the resulting mess was that, whatever the damn thing meant, it must be a sonnet; octet and sestet were unmistakably distinguished. However, a journalist in the Sunday Independent, mad with patriotic and linguistic enthusiasm, hailed it as a ‘perfect translation’. It was a period when journalists could improvise a literature as lightly as country clerks improvised government departments. The occasion brought forth the man – a view of history I have always been rather doubtful of.
I haunted the streets for Corkery till I finally trapped him one day by the Scots Church at the foot of Summerhill and casually showed him the cutting from the Sunday Independent. He asked if I had the translation with me, and curiously I had that too. He read it carefully with one eye half closed, not commenting too much on the grammar, which was probably invisible through the typographical errors, and said judicially that it was a beautiful translation. At any rate, he apparently decided that, since what could not be cured must be endured, he had to admit me to his own little group. After all, I was now a published author.
He lived in a small suburban house on Gardiner’s Hill with his mother and sister, surrounded by books and pictures. Over the mantelpiece was a large water colour of his own of a man with a scythe on Fair Hill, overlooking the great panorama of the river valley. Inside the door of the living-room was a bust of him by his friend, Joe Higgins, which – if my memory of it is correct – is the only likeness of him that captures all his charm. He presided over his little group from a huge Morris chair with a detachable desk that he had made for himself (he was an excellent craftsman, having been brought up to the trade, and once told me in his oracular way that ‘nobody had ever met a stupid carpenter’, which I later found to be untrue).
He had a good deal of the harshness and puritanism of the provincial intellectual which I share. As those brought up to wealth and rank tend to under-rate them, people accustomed from childhood to an intellectual atmosphere can take classical standards lightly and permit themselves to be entertained by mere facility; not those who have had to buy them dear. Once, when I was working on the railway, and had spent a whole week’s pocket money on Wilde’s Intentions, I met Corkery and he glanced at the book and shook his head. ‘It’ll ruin whatever style you have,’ he said, and even the suggestion that I might have a style did not make up to me for the realization that once again I had backed the wrong horse.
Most of his friends belonged to a little group that had worked with him when he ran a tiny theatre in Queen Street. The most faithful visitor was Denis Breen, a schoolteacher like himself, who had provided the music and married one of the actresses. He was a big, emotional man with a fat, sun-coloured face, clear, childish blue eyes, and a red moustache that he apparently cultivated for the sole purpose of eating it – a face Franz Hals would have loved. At Gaelic League meetings he roared down patriotic souls who decried English music and talked of the greatness of Byrd, Dowland and Purcell, whom none of us had ever heard of. He also professed to be an atheist, which was rather like proclaiming yourself a Christian in modern China, and the defensiveness this had induced in him was reflected in everything he did and said. He had a great contempt for our little colony of German musicians, whom he spoke of as though they were Catholic priests, as ‘bleddy eejits’. They, more objectively, spoke of him as a genius without musical training. It might be fairer to say that his temperament was too immoderate for the precise and delicate work of the artist – the very opposite of Corkery’s. The two men were always arguing, Corkery gently and inquiringly, Breen uproariously and authoritatively, something like this. ‘Well, on the other hand, would it not be possible to say…?’ ‘Me dear man, it’s possible to say anything, if you’re fool enough.’ I listened in shame for the whole human race to think that anyone could be so presumptuous as to disagree with Corkery.
I did not like Breen. I was connected with him through two coincidences: one that he had taught me for a couple of days before I left Blarney Lane for good, and even in that short time he had beaten me (Irish teachers, like American policemen, never having learned that to go about armed is not the best way of securing obedience and respect); the other was that my mother and his mother, who kept a little sweet shop at the gate of the University, had been friends. His mother had told my mother that even when he was a small boy no one could control him. He would get hungry at night, go down to the shop for biscuits, sample every tin and leave them all open, so that by morning her stock was ruined. Even when I knew him he would begin his tea by eating all the sweet cakes in case anyone else took a fancy to them. He was greedy with a child’s greed, shouted everyone down with what he thought ‘funny’ stories of denunciations of the ‘bleddy eejits’ who ran the country or its music, and battered a Beethoven sonata to death with his red eyebrows reverently raised, believing himself to be a man of perfect manners, liberal ideas and perfect taste. All of which, of course, he was, as I learned later when we became friends, for though his wife and my mother would look blank while he ate all the confectionery and then shouted for more; and though afterwards he hammered Wolf’s An Die Geliebte unconscious; he struck out the last chords as only a man who loved music could do it, scowling and muttering: ‘Now listen to the bloody stars!’ He quarrelled bitterly with me after the first performance of a play called The Invincibles because he had convinced himself that I had caricatured him in the part of Joe Brady, the leader of the assassins – a brave and simple man driven mad by injustice – and though at the time I was disturbed because such an idea had never occurred to me, it seems to me now that the characters in whom we think we recognize ourselves are infinitely more revealing of our real personalities than those in which someone actually attempts to portray us.
But Corkery’s greatest friend was Sean O’Faolain, who was three years older than I and all the things I should have wished to be – handsome, brilliant and, above all, industrious. For Corkery, who loved application, kept on rubbing it in that I didn’t work as O’Faolain did. Once the three of us met on Patrick’s Bridge after Corkery and O’Faolain had attended a service at the cathedral, and when O’Faolain went off in his home-spun suit, swinging his ash-plant, Corkery looked after him as I had once seen him look after Terence MacSwiney and said: ‘There goes a born literary man!’ For months I was mad with jealousy.
The first book I took from Corkery’s bookcase was a Browning. It was characteristic of my topsy-turvy self-education that I knew by heart thousands of lines in German and Irish, without really knowing either language, but had never heard of Browning, or indeed of any other English poet but Shakespeare, whom I didn’t think much of. But my trouble with poetry was that of most autodidacts. I could not afford books, so I copied and memorized like mad. It is a theory among scholars that all great periods of manuscript activity coincide with some impending social disaster and that scribes are like poor Jews in the midst of a hostile community, gathering up their few little treasures in the most portable form before the next pogrom. Obviously I anticipated the disaster of the Irish Civil War, because I never seemed to possess anything unless I had written it down and learned it by heart, and though I scorned what I thought mediocre verse, and never bothered to acquire anything that had not been approved by the best authorities, the authorities themselves proved most unreliable, and for every good poem I learned, I learned six bad ones. Unlike the poor Jew, I could not throw away the imitation pearls, so though my taste in poetry improved, my memory refused to adapt itself, and when it should have been producing masterpieces, it would suddenly take things into its own hands and produce something frightful by some minor Georgian poet like Drinkwater. Describing the death of a neighbour, a small boy in our locality drew his hand across his throat and said darkly: ‘De woman went before her God full up to dat of whiskey.’ I shall go before mine full up to that of bad poetry.
Music was different and much more difficult because I had no standards at all. When people played or sang music-hall songs I behaved as I did when they told dirty stories and either left the room or read a book, but I could not go out in the evening without passing a neighbour’s house where an old-fashioned horn-gramophone bellowed songs from The Arcadians and, in spite of the fact that the Christian Brothers thought I had a defective ear, I picked them up and – like the bad poetry – I have them still. When I became friends with a young fellow called Tom MacKernan, who drilled beside me in the Volunteers and played the fiddle, I got him to play me certified classical tunes from his violin book. I even got him to lend me an old fiddle and a tutor, but I could not make head or tail of staff notation. When I met Jack Hendrick, whose brother was a singer, I got him to teach me the songs his brother sang at musical competitions like Where’er You Walk and Am Stillen Herd, though I still could not understand key changes and thought he was probably singing out of tune. Corkery took me a couple of times to real piano recitals by Tilly Fleischmann and Geraldine Sullivan, but though I read the programme notes like mad – they were usually by Corkery’s friend, Father Pat MacSwiney – and pretended to myself that I could recognize the moment when ‘the dawn wind wakes the sleeping leaves, and these, tapping at the window pane, rouse the joyous maiden who has been dreaming of her secret lover’, it always turned out that I had just been listening to the climax in which ‘Smiling, she leans through the window and plucks a rose for her hair’. It mortified me to see all those educated people who had no difficulty in distinguishing the dawn wind rising from a girl plucking a rose for her hair and made me feel that life was really unfair.
I had no luck with music till Corkery bought a gramophone from Germany immediately after the 1914–18 War, when the rate of exchange was favourable, and with it a selection of records that included Bach’s Sixth Cello Sonata, a couple of Beethoven symphonies, Mozart’s Violin Concerto in A, Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel. I gave Strauss up as a bad job because it would clearly not be portable in any future pogrom, but I practically learned the Seventh Symphony and the Mozart Concerto by heart, and for years judged everything by them. I can now read second-rate books without getting sick, but I still cannot listen to mediocre music. I had too much trouble escaping from it.
Corkery took me sketching with him as well, but I was never much good at that, ‘it’s like me with my game leg entering for the hundred yards,’ he said kindly, blaming it on my sight, but it wasn’t my sight. It was my undeveloped visual sense. The imagination, because it is by its nature subjective, pitches first on the area of the intimate arts – poetry and music. Painting, which is more objective and critical, comes later. Still, that did not keep him from getting me into the School of Art, where I spent my time copying casts, drawing from the male model, and arguing like mad with my teacher, who said that Michelangelo was ‘very coarse’. Apparently, Corkery’s idea was that since I could never get into a university, I should become an art teacher, and he even arranged a scholarship in London for me. But I was in a frenzy to earn a little money and, instead, like a fool, I applied for a scholarship to a Gaelic League Summer School in Dublin that had been formed to train teachers of Irish, who would later cycle about the country from village to village, teaching in schools and parish halls. It sounded exactly the sort of life for an aspiring young writer who wanted to know Ireland as Gorky had known Russia.
The Summer School was held in the Gaelic League headquarters in Parnell Square, and the head of it was a sly, fat rogue of a West Cork man called Hurley, who was later Quartermaster General of the Free State Army. I did not like Dublin, probably because most of the time I was light-headed with hunger. I lodged in a Georgian house on the Pembroke Road and, having rarely eaten in any house other than my own, I contented myself with a cup of tea and a slice of bread for breakfast. I decided that the chamber pot in my bedroom was for ornament rather than use. I was even more scared of restaurants than of strange houses. I had never eaten in one except when Mother took me to Thompson’s café in Patrick Street for a cup of coffee – her notion of high life – so I lived entirely on coffee and buns in Bewley’s. It was to be years before I worked up the courage to go into a real restaurant. Besides, the scholarship did not amount to more than the price of modest lodgings, and I needed every penny I could spare for the books I could pick up cheap at the stalls on the quays. I could not keep away from them. There were books there the like of which one never saw in a Cork bookstore. It was there that I picked up for a few pence the little Selected Poems of Browning published by Smith, Elder, which for me has always been one of the great books of the world, and when the hunger got too much for me I would recite to myself: ‘Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes of labdanum and aloeballs’ as though it were a spell.
Far from being recognized as a genius at the school, I was obviously regarded as a complete dud. The reason for this did not dawn on me till years had gone by. All the other students had had a good general education, some a university education. I talked Irish copiously, but nobody had explained to me the difference between a masculine and feminine noun, or a nominative and dative case. Nobody explained to me then either, probably because the problem of a completely uneducated boy masquerading as a well-educated one was outside everyone’s experience.
And yet, the whole country was doing the same, and Hurley, who gave the impression of having served his time in a West Cork drapery store, was on his way to one of the highest ranks in the army. My friends in the school were a Dubliner called Byrne and a Kerryman called Kavanagh. Byrne was doubly endeared to me because, though only a boy scout, he had already been involved in a pistol fight with a police patrol. Some hunger striker had died in prison and was being given a public funeral, so the three of us demanded the afternoon off to attend it, and fell foul of Hurley, who objected to what he called ‘politics’ in the school. When the time for the funeral came the three of us got up to leave the class and Hurley, in a rage, dismissed it. We were expecting trouble, and Byrne had a revolver. The imaginary revolution was taking shape as well.
I was lucky to return to Cork with a certificate that made me a qualified teacher of Irish – which I was not – and for a few weeks I cycled eight or ten miles out of the city in the evenings to teach in country schools by lamp-light. But already even this was becoming dangerous, and soon curfew put an end to my new career as well. I seemed to be very unlucky with my jobs.
At the same time I was making friends of a different type. One evening a pale, thin-lipped young clerk in an insurance office, called Jack Hendrick, came to see me with an introduction from Corkery and proposed that the two of us should start a literary and debating society. Our conversation was rather at cross-purposes, for he did not seem to have read anything but d’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature and he continued to quote this to me as I quoted Turgenev and Dostoevsky to him. He didn’t seem to know about them, and I had never heard of d’Israeli, so I agreed to borrow it from him and meanwhile lent him Turgenev’s Virgin Soil and Gogol’s Taras Bulba. When we met again I admitted that I was bored with d’Israeli, and he said he thought Turgenev was ‘cold’. We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, but I needed a friend too badly to reject one merely because he said outrageous things about Turgenev, and Hendrick was exactly the sort of friend I needed because he had every virtue that I lacked and was well-mannered, methodical, cool and thoughtful. He had a neat, square, erect handwriting that I greatly admired for its legibility, and I set out to imitate it as I had imitated Corkery’s monosyllabic articulation, but I was too restive to do anything that required exacting labour, and Hendrick’s handwriting was a career in itself.
I explained to him that I now had a chance of a teaching job, but it meant I would have to ride a bicycle, and I had been assured by the man who had tried to teach me that I had no sense of balance and would never be able to ride. I had accepted this without question because it was only one of the dozen things I had been told I couldn’t do. I couldn’t sing; I couldn’t pass an examination; I couldn’t persevere at a task – naturally I couldn’t ride a bicycle. That evening Hendrick brought his sister’s bicycle out the Ballyvolane Road, put me up on it, unclenched my fists on the handlebars, and when we came to the first long hill, gave me a push that sent me flying. I was a mass of bruises when I picked myself up at the foot of the hill, but when I wheeled back the bicycle, Hendrick, who by this time was sitting on the grass by the roadside, smoking, took out his cigarettes and said with a pale smile: ‘Now you know how to ride a bicycle.’
But even this was of less importance to me than the fact that I was beginning to make friends away from my own gas-lamp. It was probably this that Blake had in mind when he said that if only a fool would persevere in his folly he would become a wise man, because sooner or later the imaginative improvisation imposes itself on reality. But it is only then that its real troubles begin, when it must learn to restrain itself from imposing too far, and acquire a smattering of the practical sense it has rejected. That, I think, is where the Irish Revolution broke down. The imagination is a refrigerator, not an incubator; it preserves the personality intact through disaster after disaster, but even when it has changed the whole world it has still changed nothing in itself and emerges as a sort of Rip Van Winkle, older in years but not in experience. This sets up a time lag that can never be really overcome.
Friendship did not make me wiser or happier, for years of lonely daydreaming had left me emotionally at the age of ten. I was ashamed to admit that there was anything I didn’t know, and one evening when Corkery talked to me about a story of Gorky’s in which there was a eunuch, I was too mortified to admit that I didn’t know what a eunuch was. I was morbidly sensitive, jealous, exacting, and terrified of strangers. I did not merely make friends; I fell in love, and even the suspicion of a slight left me as frantic as a neurotic schoolgirl. The attitudes of the ghetto survive emancipation, and I had only to enter a strange house or talk to a stranger to make a complete fool of myself. From excessive shyness I always talked too much, usually lost control of myself, and heard myself say things that were ridiculous, false or base, and afterwards remained awake, raging and sobbing by turns as I remembered every detail of my own awkwardness, lying and treachery. Years later, when I was earning money, I never went to a strange house without first taking a drink or two to brace me for the ordeal. Whether that was much help or not I do not know. It is enough that the things I said when I was slightly intoxicated were never quite as bad as the things I said when I wasn’t.
As if this weren’t enough, I was also going through the usual adolescent phase of snobbery and was ashamed of my parents, ashamed of the little house where we lived, and when people called for me, I grabbed my cap and dragged them out anywhere, for fear Father should start telling funny stories about his army days or Mother reveal that she was only a charwoman. With me, of course, this was also complicated by the number of things that really humiliated me, like my clothes, which were decent but patched, and the fact that I could never get on a tram without first scanning the passengers to make sure there was no girl aboard whose fare I should not be able to pay. As a result I never got on a tram at all until the moment it started to move, and tried to find a seat where no one could come and sit beside me. Then if I continued to look out at the street till the conductor had gone by, I was safe.
My fight for Irish freedom was of the same order as my fight for other sorts of freedom. Still like Dolan’s ass, I went a bit of the way with everybody, and in those days everybody was moving in the same direction. Hendrick did not get me to join a debating society, but I got him to join the Volunteers. If it was nothing else, it was a brief escape from tedium and frustration to go out the country roads on summer evenings, slouching along in knee breeches and gaiters, hands in the pockets of one’s trenchcoat and hat pulled over one’s right eye. Usually it was only to a parade in some field with high fences off the Rathcooney Road, but sometimes it was a barrack that was being attacked, and we trenched roads and felled trees, and then went home through the wet fields over the hills, listening for distant explosions and scanning the horizon for fires. It was all too much for poor Father, who had already seen me waste my time making toy theatres when I should have been playing football, and drawing naked men when I should have been earning my living. And this time he did at least know what he was talking about. For all he knew I might have the makings of a painter or writer in me but, as an old soldier himself, he knew that I would never draw even a disability pension. No good could come of such foolishness, and it would only be the mercy of God if the police at St Luke’s didn’t blame him for my conduct and write to the War Office to get his pensions stopped. The old trouble about locking the door at night became acute. Ten o’clock was when he went to bed – earlier when curfew was on – and the door had to be fastened for the night: the latch, the lock, the big bolt and the little bolt. When I knocked, Mother got out of bed to open it, Father shouted at her, and she called back indignantly to him not to wake the neighbours, and whispered in anguish to me: ‘Don’t answer him whatever he says!’ But stung in my pride as a soldier of Ireland, I often did answer back, and then he roared louder than ever that I was ‘better fed than taught’. Mother’s sympathies were entirely with the revolution, and he would have been more furious still if he had known that not long after she was doing odd errands herself, carrying revolvers and despatches. Or maybe he did know and, like many another husband, decided to ignore her minor infidelities.
I was changing, but though I did not realize it till much later, Corkery was changing, too, in an infinitely subtler and more significant way, and the man I loved was turning into someone I should not even be able to understand. I was merely puzzled and hurt when one night he said: ‘You must remember there are more important things in life than literature.’ I knew there weren’t, because if there were I should be doing them. That change goes farther back than the period I am writing of, and was not perceptible until years later. It is not in his novel, The Threshold of Quiet, but it is already adumbrated in the first story of A Munster Twilight. In this a worldly farmer wishes to plough the Ridge of the Saints – sanctified ground – but his old farmhand, steeped in traditional pieties, refuses to do it. He taunts his employer by offering to plough the Ridge if the farmer will put his great sire-horse, Ember, to the plough. At the end of the story the old farmhand yokes the sire-horse and the mare, whose name is Beauty, and goes out at nightfall to plough the Ridge, the horses quarrel and horses and man are hurled together over the cliff.
This is a typical bit of symbolism that seems to sum up a deep personal conflict. It describes the suicidal destruction of the creative faculty as an act of revolt against the worldliness of everyday life. ‘There are more important things in life than literature.’ Scores of other modern writers like Ibsen and James have used such symbolic equations as a way of trying out their personal problems, but this one seems to me to describe what really happened. It is as though the imaginative improvisation of the community had begun to dominate the imaginative improvisation of the artist and make its fires seem dim by comparison. Of course there must have been some more immediate cause, and I sometimes wonder whether it was not Corkery’s friendship with Thomas MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney. MacCurtain’s murder aroused the country and MacSwiney’s death on hunger-strike was watched by the whole world and cost the British Government more than a major military defeat. It seems to me now that Corkery’s admiration for the two men may have made him feel that men of action had more to give than the mere artist like himself. His admiration for the men of action is in The Hounds of Bamba, the book of stories he was writing at the time, and there are stories in this that repeat the symbolic equation of the horses. One, for instance, describes how a jockey, who is also a traditionalist, takes up a bet made by his half-witted employer, rides a famous horse along the cliffs, and then wrestles with the horse and throws him bodily over the edge into the sea. Even in the stories where there is no symbolism there is a celebration of imaginary heroes and an attack on imaginary enemies who are not far removed from windmills. And Corkery knew his windmill-fighters, for once when we were looking at a picture called Don Quixote he said sharply: ‘Those eyes are wrong. They’re looking out. Quixote’s eyes looked inward.’
I do not blame myself for not understanding and sympathizing with what was happening to him, because it was precisely the opposite of what was happening to me. He was a man who, by force of character, had dominated physical difficulties, family circumstances and a provincial environment that would have broken down anyone but a great man. Breen, who gave the impression of being opposed to him, cursed and raged whenever he described Corkery’s suffering in the teachers’ training college they had attended together, and I am certain that this sprang from Breen’s own clear eye and passionate heart rather than from any self-pity on Corkery’s part. Nowadays I remember how his mind seemed always to brood on self-control, as when he described how he had written his novel, getting up each morning at six, or wrote to me when I was in prison, quoting Keats on the beneficial effect of a shave and wash-up when one’s spirits were low, or praised Michael Collins, who had made himself leader of the whole revolutionary movement because he was up answering letters when everyone else was in bed. He was as shy and reserved as Chekhov and never asked for sympathy, but behind words like these one could detect a whole lifetime of self-control. Yet he did not, as a lesser man might have done, lose generosity in speaking of an enemy or gentleness in rebuking a friend. He would gaze at me gloomily, and predict in his harsh, unmodulated voice that I would go through life without ever finishing anything, and then add ‘like Coleridge’, awarding me a valuable second prize. I have described how he ticked me off for reading Wilde, because it would injure whatever style I had. Yeats had exactly the same trick. When he was forming his Academy, even before I had published a book, he and I quarrelled about the constitution of the Academy and he muttered: ‘Why worry about literary eminence? You and I will provide that.’ Of course it was guileful, and in a lesser man it might have been the basest flattery, but I understood it in him as in Corkery as the desperate attempt of the elderly and eminent man to break down the barriers that separated him from youth and awkwardness. Because of that Corkery developed an authority that was like Yeats’s. If, as I now fancy, he was impressed by Mac-Swiney’s sacrifice, it was probably because MacSwiney’s remarkable self-control and self-denial had given him an authority beyond his intellect and gifts, but Corkery’s self-control was of a rarer kind. However little he said, and however insipid what he said might seem, it was on his judgement that we all relied, and I think that in the way of those who combine self-control and humanity, austerity and sweetness, he was full of a consciousness of his own power he would have been much too shy to reveal. Only once did he let anything drop that suggested it, and that was one evening when I suggested that great writers might be more careful of what they did and said if only they remembered the sort of people who would write their lives, and he shrugged and replied: ‘Well, I know people will write my life…’
That is the period when I best like to remember him. After a cruel day’s teaching he would take his paints and sketchbook and trudge miles into the country with me at his heels. I would quote a line or two of Omar Khayyám, and at once he would take alarm lest any fledgling of his should be taken in by something less than a masterpiece. ‘What is it about Fitzgerald that’s not quite right?’ he would ask, and I, as well-skilled in the responses as any acolyte, would reply: ‘Well, it is a bit sugary, isn’t it?’ ‘It is on the sweet side,’ he would say thoughtfully, as though the idea had only just occurred to him, and then, seeing the gable of a cottage in the evening light, he would climb laboriously over a stone wall and search for a dry stone to sit on, cracking jokes about his own softness. ‘Turner, of course, sat in a wet ditch to paint.’ Then, in the late evening he stood at the door of his little house, leaning against the jamb to take the weight from off his bad foot, his hands in his trousers pockets and his small, dark, handsome head thrown lazily back as he talked endlessly about writers and writing, lost to everything else, a man mad on literature. And remembering him like this I find myself humming the song I made Hendrick teach me: Herr Walther von der Vogelweid, der ist mein Meister gewesen.
But self-control like his exacts a terrible price from the artist and already, like the king in his own play, weary of struggle with the world, he must have been brooding on abdication before those who seemed to exercise real authority, even though it could never be more than a shadow of his own.