The period from the end of 1922 to the spring of 1923 was one that I found almost unbearably painful. I still had no money nor any way of earning it. Sometimes I slept in the house of Sean French, who was in prison; sometimes I went off with a friend, whom I shall call Joe Clery, and his friend, and the three of us spent the night in a hay-barn or commandeered beds for ourselves in a big house on Montenotte. Clery and his friend fascinated me. Both were swift, cool and resourceful, and seemed to enjoy the atmosphere of danger as much as I dreaded it. Corkery, with whom I discussed them, suggested that the Russian Revolution had shown that, after a certain stage, control of a revolutionary movement passes from the original dreamers to men who are professional revolutionaries.
I am afraid that Corkery saw historical prototypes as I saw literary ones, and that there was more than that to it. The romantic improvisation was tearing right down the middle, and on both sides the real killers were emerging. One morning Clery told me that we were needed for a ‘job’ that evening. The ‘job’ was to shoot unarmed soldiers courting their girls in deserted laneways, and the girls as well if there was any danger of our being recognized. I lost my head, and said I would put a stop to the ‘job’ in one way if I couldn’t do it in another. Clery felt as I did and agreed that I should consult Corkery, who was my authority for everything. It was hard luck on Corkery, but he accepted this as he accepted every other responsibility, and advised me to see Mary MacSwiney, Terence’s sister and our local representative in Parliament. I went to her house and she received me very coldly. She thought me an indiscreet young man, which, indeed, I was. ‘You seem to have some moral objection to killing women’, she said disapprovingly, and when I admitted that I had, she added complacently; ‘I see no moral objection, though there may be a political one.’ I stayed in her house till a messenger returned from the local commandant to say that the operation had been called off.
It was clear to me that we were all going mad, and yet I could see no way out. The imagination seems to paralyse not only the critical faculty but the ability to act upon the most ordinary instinct of self-preservation. I could be obstinate enough when it came to the killing of unarmed soldiers and girls because this was a basic violation of the imaginative concept of life, whether in the boys’ weeklies or the Irish sagas, but I could not detach myself from the political attitudes that gave rise to it. I was too completely identified with them, and to have abandoned them would have meant abandoning faith in myself.
Any moments of relaxation and sanity that came to me were in the few houses I visited, like the Barrys’ in Windsor Cottages, the O’Learys’ on Gardiner’s Hill or the Frenches’ on the Wellington Road. The French household consisted of his mother and four sisters. Kitty O’Leary, Hendrick’s girl, was a great friend of the family, and when she called, the four sisters mustered about her at the piano and sang all the music-hall songs of the time – ‘Oh, It’s a Windy Night Tonight, Sally, Sally!’ and ‘I Left My Love in Avalon’ while I listened with the emotions of a seminarist at a ribald party. As a reward, at the end of the evening Kitty played a Schubert Fantasia and sang a couple of seventeenth-century bergerettes – Maman, dites-moi and Non, je n’irai plus au bois. At ten precisely, Mrs French, who looked and talked like someone out of a Jane Austen novel, asked what I should like to drink, and the ‘girls’ ranged themselves behind her and laid one finger flat on the top of another to indicate that I must ask for tea. Otherwise they would have to drink hot milk! All these homes were matriarchies. It is an Ireland that is disappearing, an Ireland arranged for the convenience of some particular man, where women – some of whom were more brilliant than any man in the household and risked their lives just as much – worked harder than servant girls and will probably never realize why it is that when I look back on the period, it is of them rather than of their brothers that I think. In those days, when the French girls had drunk their hard-earned cup of tea and gone to bed, and lorries of soldiers tore up the city hills on their sinister errands, I merely read Whitman or hummed:
Je connais trop le danger
Ou l’amour pourrait m’engager.
That was a danger that wouldn’t really engage me for a good many years, and meanwhile I had other dangers to think of. I was captured effortlessly one spring morning by two Free State soldiers. Fortunately for myself I didn’t have a gun. They marched me to their headquarters in the Courthouse.
Imprisonment came as a relief because it took all responsibility out of my hands, and, as active fighting died down and the possibility of being shot in some reprisal execution diminished, it became – what else sums up the period so well? – a real blessing. Not, God knows, that the Women’s Gaol in Sunday’s Well was anything but a nightmare. The first night I spent there after being taken from the Courthouse I was wakened by the officer of the watch going his round. As he flashed his torch about the cell he told us joyously that there had been a raid on the house of Michael Collins’ sister in Blarney Lane and one of the attackers had been captured with a revolver and would be executed. (How was I to know that the irony of circumstances would make me the guest of Michael Collins’ sister in that very house before many years had passed?) I fell asleep again, thinking merely that I was very fortunate to be out of the Courthouse where the soldiers would probably have taken it out on me. Towards dawn I was wakened by the tall, bitter-tongued man I knew as ‘Mac’, and I followed him down the corridor. A Free State officer was standing by the door of one cell, and we went in. Under the window in the gas-light that leaked in from the corridor what seemed to be a bundle of rags was trying to raise itself from the floor. I reached out my hand and shuddered because the hand that took mine was like a lump of dough. When I saw the face of the man whose hand I had taken, I felt sick, because that was also like a lump of dough. ‘So that’s how you treat your prisoners?’ Mac snarled at the officer. Mac, like my father, was an ex-British soldier, and had the old-fashioned attitude that you did not strike a defenceless man. The officer, who in private life was probably a milkman, began some muttered rigmarole about the prisoner’s having tried to burn a widow’s home and poured petrol over the sleeping children. ‘Look at that!’ Mac snarled at me, paying no attention to him. ‘Skewered through the ass with bayonets!’ I waited and walked with the boy to the head of the iron stairs where the suicide net had been stretched to catch any poor soul who found life too hard, and I watched him stagger painfully down in the gas-light. There were only a half-dozen of us there, and we stood and watched the dawn break over the city through the high unglazed windows. A few days later the boy was shot. That scene haunted me for years – partly, I suppose, because it was still uncertain whether or not I should be next, a matter that gives one a personal interest in any execution; partly because of the over-developed sense of pity that had made me always take the part of kids younger or weaker than myself; mainly because I was beginning to think that this was all our romanticism came to – a miserable attempt to burn a widow’s house, the rifle butts and bayonets of hysterical soldiers, a poor woman of the lanes kneeling in some city church and appealing to a God who could not listen, and then – a barrack wall with some smug humbug of a priest muttering prayers. (I heard him the following Sunday give a sermon on the dangers of company-keeping.) I had been able to think of the Kilmallock skirmish as though it was something I had read of in a book, but the battered face of that boy was something that wasn’t in any book, and even ten years later, when I was sitting reading in my flat in Dublin, the door would suddenly open and he would walk in and the book would fall from my hands. Certainly, that night changed something for ever in me.
But I was young, and somehow or other I had to go on living, even in that dreadful place. There were four of us in a cell that had been condemned as inadequate for one, and the one who had originally occupied it had done so in an age when they didn’t believe in coddling prisoners. It was seething with vermin. Three of us slept on the floor with our heels to the door and one on the radiator pipes under the window, and that took in the total floor space. My cell-mates were not exactly the type I had been accustomed to, and how ninety per cent of the men in prison had got there at all was beyond me. Cremin was the only one of my cell-mates that I could talk to. He was an ex-British army man with a cruel wound in the belly he had got from the Germans in the First World War. By day he made rings out of shilling pieces impaled on an iron spike while I read Hermann und Dorothea: at night, when the other men were kneeling and saying the rosary about the suicide net, he and I sang songs against one another.
The Hermann und Dorothea had, of course, come from Corkery, who signed himself ‘Martin Cloyne’, feeling sure that no one on the enemy side would ever have read his novel or recognized the name of its hero. He complained amusingly of a visit from Clery and his friend, and his sister’s discovery of the remains of a half-dozen of stout behind his bookcase – ‘These secret, midnight revels, and we in our most innocent slumber!’ With the book had come a box of Three Castles cigarettes. Heine, he added, was the proper poet for a man in prison, ‘but this, being only a university town, has never heard of Heine.’ Characteristically, after this, he sent me tobacco and cigarette papers because, as he said, it might be good for my character to have to roll my own cigarettes. How well that gentle little man understood me!
I replied in the only language I understood. The Women’s Prison overlooked the Women’s Penitentiary run by the Good Shepherd nuns, and when the penitents walked in the garden in their starched white linen coifs, the prisoners crowded to the tall window recesses and whistled at them through the bars. Someone beside myself was shocked, for after the Rosary on that first night, a small, black, bitter man made an impassioned protest, and I wrote to Corkery to say that the first person I had noticed in gaol was Baburin, the hero of Turgenev’s great story. I was still at the stage of seeing Turgenev and Dostoevsky characters everywhere. It was a little closer to reality than Cu Chulainn and Werther, but not much.
Early one morning we were driven through the city to Glanmire Station, and after a long wait in the place where I had already endured so much, we were locked in old-fashioned carriages and the train set off. As it emerged from the tunnel at Rathpeacon we all rushed to the windows to catch a final glimpse of Cork. At Mallow the viaduct was blown up (Childers was supposed to have done it), so we were marched through the town to the railway station. It was April and the whole country looked lovely.
We were locked in our carriages again with nothing but tinned fish to eat, and when the others developed a thirst they could not quench, I was glad I had not been able to eat it. It was dark when we reached Dublin, and after another long halt, we were shunted across the city to Amiens Street and off into the countryside again. The sea was on our righthand side. None of us knew this part of the country, and we had no notion of where we were going. The Free State Government had been negotiating with the British Government for the renting of St Helena to use as a prison, and the general impression was that we were going there. Instead, we stopped at a wayside station in flat pastoral country about an hour’s run from Dublin. In the distance a searchlight moved petulantly up and down the sky and over the fields, picking out white-washed cottages and trees in their first leaf and flattening them against the night like pieces of theatre scenery. We marched towards the searchlight, and it flickered along with us, half human in its mechanical precision, till it became a new sensation like hunger and weariness, and gave everything a hallucinatory look.
At last a group of low, irregular buildings emerged, changing continuously like the images in a kaleidoscope – a long whitewashed hall, a group of dark wooden huts with every board defined by shadow as if by blown snow, a tall gate set in a high fence of barbed wire and lit by arc-lamps. Outside this was another row of wooden huts that seemed to serve as offices and in front of these we were left standing for hours in the cold as the prisoners were checked in, a half-dozen at a time. It was early morning when I was escorted through the main gate. At the quartermaster’s store I was given a spring bed, a mattress, blankets and tinware, but when I tried to carry them I fainted. A military policeman helped me to my hut and showed me how to fix my bed, while other prisoners called from their beds to inquire where I had come from and who was with me. All were looking for their own friends and relatives.
Next morning, when I opened my eyes in a real bed, and a man leaving the hut let in a breath of morning air and a glimpse of green fields and blue sky. I felt I was dreaming. That is what I think of whenever I hear the Good Friday music from Parsifal:
Doch sah ich nie so mild und zart
Die Halmen, Blüthen und Blumen.
It was a long, high, well-lit hut, divided down the middle by a wooden partition that was about as high as a man, and at either side of it and along the walls were rows of beds, metal beds, and wooden beds made of three boards, twenty-five or thirty beds in a row, and all the men were still asleep, wrapped in their brown military blankets. My own bed was against a wall beside a window, and through the window I could see another hut of the same kind across the way. A whistle blew from outside and the little man who had blown it entered the hut and came down between the two rows of beds. When he reached mine and saw me awake, he stopped and instead of blowing on his police whistle he whistled ‘Kelly the Boy from Killan’, at the same time marking time and miming an elaborate conversation in which he discussed with me the slothfulness of the younger generation, the beauty of the morning, and the delight of one gentleman on meeting another, which was apparently his idea of a joke. I replied in the same Way – that morning I was in the mood for seeing jokes – and he raised his hat to march time and went on, blasting away again at his police whistle.
Later came more whistles, and the men dressed hastily and made their beds. Military policemen stationed themselves outside each hut and we stood at ease at the foot of our beds. Another whistle blew outside the door, the hut-leader gave an order, and the men sprang to attention. Then a military officer, accompanied by one of our own staff, entered and passed quickly between the rows of beds, both counting. Nominally we stood to attention only for our own officer. This was part of the camp organization, and I began by admiring it greatly. It duplicated completely the enemy organization so that none of our men ever made contact with their gaolers. Our quartermaster indented for supplies to the enemy quartermaster, our postmaster received our mail from the enemy postmaster; we stood to attention to be counted by our own officer. It was all very dignifed and practical. Or so I thought.
Count, because of the new arrivals, dragged intolerably that morning, and after it came Mass, which was attended only by a handful of men. It was held in the big dining hall, and only the acolyte, a pacifist by conviction, was permitted to communicate. We who were not were not allowed to receive the sacraments. After Mass the whistle blew for breakfast, and I collected my knife, fork, spoon, mug and plate and found my way back to the dining hall. It struck me that the life was going to suit me fine. Within an hour or two I was roped into the teaching staff to teach Irish, for there were an almost unlimited number of students but hardly any teachers. The classes, consisting only of men who attended because they wanted to learn, were excellent, and the teaching standard was high. Spanish was taught by Fred Cogley, who had spent a lot of his life in South America, French by his son. The two of them shared a room with Childers’ friend, Frank Gallagher. It was a joy to sit and talk with them and feel that I was back with the sort of people who had really started the Revolution – men who read books and discussed general ideas. They were the type I had looked up to for years and I like looking up to people; it gives me a sense of direction.
All I needed now was to rid myself of the lice I had brought from that foul gaol. Fortunately the weather was fine, and I could wash my clothes and air them in the grass. Besides, the camp was an American aerodrome, dating from the First World War; the American plumbing still functioned spasmodically, and each morning I rose before anyone else was awake, took a cold shower and a brisk walk of a couple of miles round the compound, and prepared my lessons before Mass, and each morning the nightmare of the Civil War grew fainter in my mind, the sleepless nights, the aimless skirmishes and the futile, sickening executions. I loved that early-morning freedom, with the rich fields of Meath all round me and the possibility of silence and recollection before the others came awake, because for the rest of the day the big hut was full of noise and movement, wrestling matches and arguments. Some of the men hammered away at rings, others stood at the partition and wove macram bags, and there was a continuous coming and going of people mad with boredom, restless, inquisitive and talkative. Now it was a Clare officer with a nervous temperament who wanted to discuss the immortality of the soul, now a West of Ireland teacher who dreamed of becoming a great lawyer and would smile and cry: ‘Ah, to be able to sway vast crowds by the magic of the human voice!’ The French Grammar I was studying would be sufficient in itself to halt a half a dozen visitors, some with mothers who had spoken French like natives, others who had not availed themselves of the chance of studying it at school and would regret it till their dying day. Anything for the chance of a conversation! It had its advantages, of course, for one’s mind was always exposed to the play of new impressions, but it left one crazy for privacy.
The camp was quiet again only on fine afternoons when a majority of the men marched out to the recreation field to play football or watch it. Sometimes I went with them for the sake of the view across the fields to the sea, just to recite to myself: ‘It keeps eternal whisperings around desolate shores,’ but usually I found it pleasanter to remain behind and work. Apart from the lack of privacy, boredom was the great curse and routine its only alleviation; this was what was so good about the military organization of the camp.
A serious gap in my education was revealed to me during the very first days when I prepared my lessons for class, and the shock nearly killed me. I opened an Irish Grammar for what must have been the first time and read it through with a sinking heart. M. Jourdain’s astonishment on discovering that he had been talking prose all his life was nothing to mine on discovering that I had been talking grammar – and bad grammar at that. Even my training as a teacher had been mainly confined to texts and conversation. I don’t mean that I hadn’t heard of nouns, verbs and adjectives, because obviously I could have learned nothing if I hadn’t learned that, but I had not taken it seriously. For me, languages had always been a form of magic, like girls, and I would as soon have thought of taking liberties with one as with the other. Now I started reciting to myself from my little hoard of Irish and German poetry, realizing that if the poet used one form of a word instead of another, it was not because he liked it better but because it was the correct one.
Whatever the importance of grammar in reading or writing, as an image of human life it seems to me out on its own. I have never since had any patience with the apostles of usage. Usage needs no advocates, since it goes on whether one approves of it or not, and in doing so breaks down the best regulated languages. Grammar is the breadwinner of language as usage is the housekeeper, and the poor man’s efforts at keeping order are for ever being thwarted by his wife’s intrigues and her perpetual warnings to the children not to tell Father. But language, like life, is impossible without a father and he is forever returning to his thankless job of restoring authority. As an emotional young man, I found it a real help to learn that there was such a thing as an object, whether or not philosophers admitted its existence, and that I could use the accusative case to point it out as I would point out a man in the street. In later years George Moore fell in love with the subjunctive – a pretty little mood enough, though, as his books show, much too flighty for a settled man.
Maybe it was the grammar that started me off, or maybe the grammar itself was only a symptom of the emergence from a protracted adolescence, but I was beginning to have grave doubts about many of the political ideas I had held as gospel. One was that the Irish Republic founded in 1916 still existed, that it could not be disestablished except by the free choice of the people – free choice being one exercised in the complete absence of external compulsion; that the shadow government that accepted its principles was the only lawful one and that we could not sit in a usurping parliament. I began to see that the form of choice that was postulated was a rather ideal one, and said that the idea of abstaining from attendance in parliament was absurd. Only one of my new acquaintances agreed with me. He was Tom Walsh, an Irish-speaker from Clare who, when he met me, remembered a poem I had published in some political weekly. It is only in the wilder parts of Ireland, where a newspaper is an event, that a studious, lonely young farmer would remember a poem like that. Walsh was powerfully built; he shambled about with his head down, a lock of dark hair dangling over one eye and with a vague, shy air as though he hoped you would be kind enough not to notice him. But his big features had a shimmering delicacy that revealed an inner conflict; he had a slight stammer that exaggerated his slowness of speech, and when he was at his most earnest there appeared on each temple a slight pallor as though with him thought were something physical, like lifting a great weight. His smile, usually wistful, but sometimes joyous and mischievous, was like sunlight over a western moor. I knew he wrote poetry in Irish but he wouldn’t show it to me, and when I pressed him about it, he only became distressed. His diffidence must have run in the family, for he once described to me how his father had caught the local thief at their potato pit by night and, frenzied with embarrassment seeing a neighbour do wrong, could only wave his arms and cry: ‘Ah, what will the soul do at the Judgement?’ (What the thief said the soul would do was very coarse but probably accurate.)
Walsh was even more disturbed than I was about our political affiliations. His eyebrows would go up into his limp dark hair, and the two white spots would show on either temple as he stammered: ‘I believe the bishops are right to excommunicate us. If I was a bishop I’d do the same.’
‘Then what are you doing here?’ I would ask, and Walsh would throw back his head and laugh softly and secretly at the absurdity of his position. To me it was no laughing matter. I knew that a countryman like Walsh was always slightly abashed before abstract ideas, but if I once convinced myself that the other side was in the right, I should never rest until I had made my position plain. I am sure we were both held back by our admiration for the majority of those among whom we had been thrown. We had our share of fatheads in the camp, and maybe a crook or two, but on an average the prisoners were far finer types than either of us would have met in a normal lifetime in Ireland – better educated, more unselfish, thoughtful and interesting; and though it is all close on forty years ago I still find myself thinking of men I knew there and wondering what life has made of them and they of life. Walsh and I used to study the autograph albums that were always circulating in the camp to see what there was in the quotations to account for our uneasiness. We noticed a preponderance of quotations from Shelley and his followers, like Meredith, with his:
Our life is but a little holding lent
To do a mighty labour; we are one
With Heaven and the stars when it is spent
To serve God’s aim – else die we with the sun!
It wasn’t that I didn’t admire Meredith, but in quotations like that there was altogether too much about dying for my taste, and it wasn’t even the harmless, sugary nineteenth-century dying of Tennyson or Christina Rossetti that always moved me to tears. This was dying for its own sweet sake, and I began to wonder if there was not some relationship between Irish nationalism and the Romantic movement. Gallagher was the great Shelleyan of the camp, and after I had listened to him lecture on Erskine Childers, I complained to him that there wasn’t a single characteristic touch of Childers in it. One evening I sat in the hut and listened to a Corkman singing in a little group about some hero who had died for Ireland and the brave things he had said and the fine things he had done, and I listened because I liked these simple little local songs that continued to be written to the old beautiful ballad airs and that sometimes had charming verses, like:
I met Pat Hanky’s mother and she to me did say,
‘God be with my son Pat, he was shot in the runaway;
‘If I could kiss his pale cold lips his wounded heart I’d cure
‘And I’d bring my darling safely home from the valley of Knockanure.’
But halfway through this song I realized that it was about the boy whose hand I had taken in the Women’s Prison in Cork one morning that spring, and suddenly the whole nightmare came back. ‘It’s as well for you fellows that you didn’t see that lad’s face when the Free Staters had finished with it,’ I said angrily. I think it must have been that evening that the big row blew up, and I had half the hut shouting at me. I shouted as well that I was sick to death of the worship of martyrdom, that the only martyr I had come close to was a poor boy from the lanes like myself, and he hadn’t wanted to die any more than I did; that he had merely been trapped by his own ignorance and simplicity into a position from which he couldn’t escape, and I thought most martyrs were the same. ‘And Pearse?’ somebody kept on crying. ‘What about Pearse? I suppose he didn’t want to die either?’ ‘Of course he didn’t want to die,’ I said. ‘He woke up too late, that was all.’ And that did really drive some of the men to fury.
I went to bed myself in a blind rage. Apparently the only proof one had of being alive was one’s readiness to die as soon as possible: dead was the great thing to be, and there was nothing to be said in favour of living except the innumerable possibilities it presented of dying in style. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live, to read, to hear music, and to bring my mother to all the places that neither of us had ever seen, and I felt these things were more important than any martyrdom. After that, whenever I saw a quotation from Shelley or one of his followers in an autograph album, I usually inserted a line or two of Goethe as near as possible to it. My favourite was: ‘One must be either the hammer or the anvil.’
And in spite of all the sentimental high-mindedness, I felt it went side by side with an extraordinary inhumanity. Or maybe angularity is the better word. It was really the lack of humour that seems to accompany every imaginative improvisation, and in other ways I must have been as humourless as everybody else.
The first incident that revealed to me what the situation was really like was funny enough. A man, whose name was, I think, Frank Murphy, had had a disagreement with his hut-leader about the amount of fatigues he had to do, so he refused to do any more. There was nothing unusual about this, of course. In an atmosphere where there was no such thing as privacy and people were always getting on one another’s nerves it was inevitable, and the sensible thing would have been to transfer Murphy to another hut. But this was against our principles. We had a complete military organization that duplicated and superseded that of our gaolers, and any slight on this was a slight on the whole fiction it was based on. Murphy was summoned before a court martial of three senior officers, found guilty and sentenced to more fatigues. Being a man of great character, he refused to do these as well. This might have seemed a complete stalemate, but not to imaginative men. The camp command took over from the enemy a small time-keeper’s hut with barred windows to use as a prison, and two prisoners, wearing tricolour armlets to show that they really were policemen and not prisoners like the rest of us, arrested Murphy and locked him up. That night Walsh and I, who both liked Murphy, visited him in his prison and talked to him through the bars of his window, while I looked round me at the tall sentry posts and beneath them the camp command taking its regular evening walk as prisoners of the men in the sentry posts, while their prisoner stared at them through the bars of his window and talked bitterly of justice and injustice. I felt the imaginative improvisation could not go farther than that, but it did. Murphy still had a shot in his locker, for he went on hunger strike, not against our gaolers but his own and – unlike them when they went on hunger strike soon after – he meant it.
This was too much even for men who affected to believe that the Irish Republic was still in existence and would remain so, no matter what its citizens might think, so a mass meeting was held in the dining hall, and the various officers addressed us on the wickedness of Murphy’s defiance of majority rule. From people who were in prison for refusing to recognize majority rule and who had even been excommunicated for it, this was pretty thick. When it was proposed to release Murphy and boycott him, and all those in favour were asked to raise their hands, nine hundred-odd hands were raised. When those against were called on, one hand went up, and that was mine. Later in life I realized that it was probably the first time I had ever taken an unpopular stand without allies.