After six months in Sligo I was sent as assistant to Wicklow, where a new library was to be opened. With me went a second assistant called Brennan, an ex-seminarist who later in life abandoned his literary career and went back to the priesthood.
I lodged in a little huxter shop kept by a widow named Soames on the main street. The house itself seemed to be slipping gently away down from the street into the river. When you opened the unlocked half of the glass front door, there were steps down into the shop, which never seemed to have anything but a few packets on its quite substantial shelving. Then a bell rang and Mrs Soames, with an old coat thrown round her shoulders, came grousing and moaning up another step from the kitchen, which was on the right. She had a long, bloodless white face and the air of an old witch. Behind the shop was the sitting-room, also down a step, but this did little to reduce the house’s urge to subside, for the floor sloped alarmingly towards the little window, and the midday soup usually overflowed on to the tablecloth.
I had the room to myself, except for one night in the week when a travelling teacher came. He was small and neat and fussy, with a rosy face and bright blue eyes. He had a poor opinion of Ireland, and when this made him too depressed, he took a couple of drinks. They only made the depression worse, and he kicked his schoolbooks round the room and broke into a nasal wail.
‘I’m a child of the sun, and what am I doing with my life? Teaching Eskimos up at the bloody North Pole. This is an awful country!’
Then he took up a Greek play and started to read it to me. When I said I didn’t understand it, he became impatient.
‘But can’t you feel it, man? Can’t you feel the Greek sunlight?’
Bill Soames, the only son, was about thirty-five. He was an agricultural labourer, and every morning, wet and fine, cycled miles out into the country to earn his miserable wages. For close on fifteen years he had been keeping company with a servant girl, and each week on her free night they went for a walk or to the cinema. In due course – maybe, if God was good, within the next ten years – his mother would die and leave him the little shop and Bridie could make a few shillings selling cigarettes and keeping a lodger as his mother did.
It was a house of character, and very pleasant on those winter evenings when the rain lashed the window and you heard the roar of shingle from beyond the Murrough, the curious bar of land that divided river from sea.
Geoffrey Phibbs, my boss, was tall and thin and dark, with a long lock of black hair that fell over one eye, a stiff, abrupt manner, a curt, high-pitched voice and a rather insolent air. There was something about him that was vaguely satanic, and he flew into hysterical rages about trifles. Within the first few minutes of our meeting he made it clear that he despised Brennan and myself and proposed to have as little as possible to do with us. He was the eldest son of a Sligo landowner, and had the natural contempt of the educated man for the self-educated. He under-valued his own education; I over-valued mine, and the laboriously acquired bits and scraps of Goethe, Heine, Musset and the Gaelic poets which with me passed for culture seemed to him mere country pedantry.
Our very first attempts to organize a library in Wicklow ran into bad trouble. Before the library committee had met at all, the priest who represented the Catholic Church on it told us that he intended to propose at our first meeting that the committee adjourn sine die. There would be no library at all if he could stop it, and he would. The reason for his opposition was still the fuss over Lennox Robinson’s ‘blasphemous story’. Although Robinson had been forced to resign and Tom McGreevy* had resigned with him, the entire library foundation came under suspicion. Clearly, the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust was involved in a vast conspiracy to deprive the poor Irishman of his faith.
Phibbs, an Irish Protestant with an English education, was incapable of understanding a situation like this, much less of dealing with it and, left to himself, he would probably have delivered a few well-chosen blasphemies and retired in a huff. I knew that in Ireland you can oppose the clergy only with nationalists, so I introduced Phibbs to another ex-jailbird, Seamus Keely, who taught Irish in the local technical school, studied law in his time off and was on his way to a judgeship.
Keely was a handsome man, though you could hardly see the good looks for the cloud of melancholy that surrounded him. Even the pince-nez on the end of his nose looked as if it were on the point of committing suicide. When I proposed that he should present himself at the committee meeting as a representative of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, he shrieked with outraged legal virtue; but when I explained that the alternative would be the abolition of the library, the humour of the suggestion dawned on him and he began to giggle. I also warned Phibbs, who would chair the meeting, to insist on a vote ex officio, which seemed to me a match for sine die any day of the week.
But it was not necessary. The mere presence of Keely, handsome, modest and fresh from an internment camp, and an exemplary Catholic besides, was enough to assure everyone that the Irishman’s simple faith was in no immediate danger. I should add that afterwards Keely, the priest and I became great friends, but the Wicklow County Library owes its existence to a shameless piece of gerrymandering by an Irish judge who was probably even less ashamed of it than I was.
After that, Phibbs treated me with considerably more respect. What was more important from my point of view was that he showed his gratitude to Keely, though none of us knew that this gentle teacher of Irish would become a judge. Phibbs realized that in our ignorant way we knew things about Irish life that he had never been taught. It was the first time I realized the isolation of the Anglo-Irish, which Elizabeth Bowen once compared to the isolation of an only child. At home, all he had known of Irish literature was Miss Hutton’s version of the Cattle Raid of Cooley – in which he had studied the youthful feats of Cu Chulainn, who drove a sliotar down the hound’s throat and then beat it over the head with a hurley stick, and a patriotic novel by Canon Sheehan called Lisheen, which always lay on the living-room table, because the house was called ‘Lisheen’. He began to sign himself ‘Seathrún MacPhilip’. But he also had the Anglo-Irish incapacity for language, and after attending a few of Keely’s Irish lessons at the technical school, he resigned himself to monolingualism.
Phibbs became the dearest and best of my friends, and I have had many. I don’t think I ever even showed Wilson a poem, but I showed all my work to Phibbs. He read my poems, which I hammered out on the office typewriter after hours, and marked them all ‘Rubbish’ except a few translations from the Irish, which I felt he accepted more because of the material than the treatment. He called for me each day at my lodgings on his way to work, but Mrs Soames soon stopped this. One day she came into the sitting-room, wailing and wringing her hands, and told me that she was delighted to welcome my friends at the house, but she had to make an exception of Mr Phibbs; he was the Devil. I told this extraordinary rigmarole to Phibbs, who was impressed rather than angry. He may have had a genuine interest in satanism and regarded her as a witch.
After this, we met at his rooms on the Murrough and drank small glasses of cheap sherry. He had a passion for the destructive criticism of religion, which I did not understand, and I still have his Bible with his exclamatory comments on the improbabilities and improprieties of the first few books – I doubt if he ever read further. He believed that marriage in the modern world was an outmoded institution. He forced Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex on me and was exasperated when I returned it unfinished and commented that it bored me. ‘It is permissible to say one is shocked by such a book,’ he said curtly. ‘It is unforgivable to say one is bored.’ He really enjoyed pornography, and when someone irritated him – which was often – he promptly got his own back by writing some murderous and bawdy satire. I still remember his poem on Robert Wilson’s English wife:
The night that she, just newly wed,
Was brought, a blushing bride, to bed
Hers was so stout a maidenhead
That all his passion, all her will,
Left her at dawn a virgin still…
Yet I, who was so puritanical that I left a room rather than listen to dirty stories, never resented either his blasphemy or obscenity. I think I understood them as the play of a powerful and utterly fearless mind, and to me they were as interesting as the antics of a tiger. I was fascinated by the sheer mental agility that went with his physical agility, which was considerable. Despite his height he walked with short quick steps, changing step frequently to adjust himself to my own long, slow stride. Sometimes I just sat and watched him as though he were something in the zoo.
He had a sort of animal beauty and a touch of animal cruelty. He had been trained as a zoologist, but his only interest was poetry, and since he simply could not grasp the idea of a foreign language, this meant English poetry. He had joined the British Army as soon as he was old enough, but when a drill sergeant shouted at him: ‘Hi, you! Take that damn thing out of your pocket!’ he had shouted back with equal truculence, ‘What do you mean, calling this book a damned thing? It’s Shelley’s Collected Poems.’ If the war had continued, he would probably have made a very fine officer.
When he was self-conscious, as he usually was for the first quarter of an hour, particularly if there was someone else in the room, he was stiff, curt and mechanical; but when he relaxed he had all the grace of a thoroughbred. The long lanky hair hung over one eye; the thin lips softened, and you saw the thick, sensual lips of the poet, and he paced round the room with his hands in his trousers pockets, bubbling with boyish laughter. Later, when I read Proust, I knew exactly what Saint-Loup must have looked like.
He was an Irish country gentleman; so he regarded himself and so he behaved – in the way in which an Irish country gentleman believes an English country gentleman behaves. He gave great thought to questions of precedence, and one night he asked me in great perturbation the meaning of a passage he had been reading in some eighteenth-century book, which laid it down that no gentleman sees his guest to the door. Being a boy from the Cork slums I had no difficulty in explaining to him that this is a butler’s job, and this gave him much food for thought.
He loved poetry as no one else I have ever known loved it, and he rapidly turned me from a reader of anthologies into a reader of poetry – a very different thing. He loved all poetry, good and bad, famous and forgotten, but he loved the forgotten best, and would come triumphantly back to Wicklow with Poems of Puncture by Amanda McKitterick Ros or the works of Thomas Caulfield Irwin. He had an unerring eye for books, and he must have spent a small fortune on them. Once, in later life, he spotted the Kilmarnock edition of Burns on the shilling shelf and, true to character, instead of buying it he brought the error in valuation to the bookseller’s attention. Once, maddened by people who borrowed books from him and did not give them back, he had defaced them all with a rubber stamp – ‘This Book Has Been Stolen from Geoffrey Phibbs’ – a typical, impulsive bit of vandalism that he must soon have regretted.
He read everything and studied everything that could conceivably have been called ‘modern’ or ‘advanced’: ballet, painting, sculpture, poetry and (even though he was tone-deaf) music. His favourite modern poet was an American woman of whom we were both to learn a great deal more. In reading, he preferred the difficult to the simple: it suited his agile, inquisitive mind, while I, of course, preferred the simple, above all if it was sufficiently gloomy. We were never in step: he loved bright modern pictures, Braque and Matisse, while I liked Rembrandt: he listened to Stravinsky or Bach on the gramophone, and I hummed the slow movement of the Beethoven C Sharp Minor Quartet; and when he quoted Carew:
To be a whore in spite of grace,
Good counsel, and an ugly face,
And to distribute still the pox
To men of wit…
I replied with Landor’s ‘Artemidora, gods invisible…’
His own verse was comparatively straightforward, and he wrote it every day – sometimes three or four poems at a time – and always off the cuff, sometimes within an hour of whatever incident had excited him. One evening, when we were out walking on the hills over Wicklow, he killed a rat, and the poem followed that very evening; another day, when he was alone, he met Austin Clarke’s wife, Margaret Lyster, and in due course, I got the poem:
Mister Lyster
Gave it to me the day she had the blister
Between Jack’s Hole and Five-Mile Water
And introduced me to her landlord’s daughter.
With him, verse was always immediate and spontaneous, and, so far as I could see, complete. The pains and aches of composition, which with me went on year after year, did not seem to exist for him. We would be working together in the office and suddenly he would reach out, grab an old envelope from the wastepaper basket and begin to scribble furiously. Then he would go to the typewriter and type it before he read it to me. I corrected the spelling and grammar, a process that amused and exasperated him: sometimes I thought he mis-spelled deliberately to keep me occupied. ‘You will die of sintactical exactniss of the mind,’ he once wrote to me. ‘I believe it is a very slow and paneful death.’
Nowadays I wonder if those early poems were not much better than I thought them. Now, at least, I realize how brilliant he was, but then, with my large appetite for melancholy music, I thought the poems too flashy, too topical and, above all, too slapdash; and I longed for the moment when the wit and topicality collapsed and let through the pure lyric tone:
Now lets laburnum loose all her light golden locks –
Or –
O solemn slope of mighty limbs so long accustomed to
Arcadian rams!
‘But I’m not much of an antiquary,’ she said. ‘Oh, no,’ I said,
‘you’re still quite young and nice.’
It doesn’t matter. We were two young poets in love with our trade, and though I wasn’t a real poet I enjoyed it as though I were, and not even one’s first experience of love-making is quite as satisfying as that.