Once, summing up what she owed to Father, Mother said that since the day of their marriage he had never looked at the side of the road another woman walked on.
She was probably right. Father was a one-woman man, and in the same way he was a one-town man, and one might go even further and say he was a one-house man. In some extraordinary way she and Cork and the house in Harrington’s Square (not to mention the pensions) were all fused together into a vast complacency that hid whatever fundamental insecurity drove him to his terrible drinking bouts. Clearly I had something of his weakness to go back to Cork in defiance of Russell’s warnings. Mother worried and fretted even more than I did, but I feel that inside she was quite free of the tyranny of objects, and I sometimes wonder if she was not half-suffocated by the close texture of Father’s world – and my own.
It was pleasure enough for me to be back with money in my pocket among those, some of whom had regarded me as a half-wit and a ne’er-do-well and some who had wished me well and thought I had something in me if only I got a chance. Even Mother, ordinarily so humble, had her little moments of satisfaction, as when the ambitious woman who had refused to salute me when I was poor took her aside to ask if the books I was always reading when I was a boy were all about being a librarian. ‘I didn’t bother to enlighten her,’ Mother said stiffly, knowing that poor Mickie Joe, the ambitious woman’s son, would at once be sent to the library to borrow books on librarianship.
But I also had enough of Mother’s intellectual inquisitiveness in me to make me aware within a month that Russell had been right. I couldn’t stand the damn place. It was one thing to be in exile from it compelled to make friends of Phibbs and Russell and rely on brief visits to report on them to Jack Hendrick* and Corkery, and another thing entirely to be in Cork with Hendrick and Corkery, waiting for the post to bring me news of Phibbs and Russell. This was a reversal of parts which I hadn’t expected at all, because it had simply never occurred to me that I could feel as deeply about new friends as about old ones. One night when I met Corkery in King Street, I said it to him quite innocently, and afterwards felt that things were never quite the same between us.
At last I was beginning to get a picture of Ireland, the real Ireland, lonely and dotty. This was no longer the romantic Ireland of the little cottages and the hunted men, but an Ireland where everyone was searching frantically for a pension or a job. I also found that my ability to handle a priest in County Wicklow was no qualification for handling the Cork County Council.
On my first morning at work I came to interview the Secretary of the County Council. I had a cheque in my pocket for what was to me a vast sum from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and I needed instructions as to where I should lodge it. I had also to select premises for my library and insure them. Under such circumstances it was the business of the senior County Council official to advise, and it was our business to regard the advice as instructions. The final decision rested with the Library Committee of the County Council when it was formed, but it was also common form that the Committee should not interfere with the Council on whom they would eventually have to rely for funds.
But, of course, nothing like this happened to me. I knew my Turgenev and Tolstoy, but they were useless when applied to local authorities. What I needed was a strong dose of Gogol, an author whom I had never studied.
I arrived at the Secretary’s office at ten o’clock in the morning and was told he was at Mass. This sort of message is one that every Irishman automatically accepts. The Secretary may even have been at Mass. About eleven-thirty he came strolling in, a tall, gangling man with long white hair and a white moustache and a wonderful air of inconsequent buccaneering. A number of people seemed to be waiting on him, and he shouted at one, became involved with another, and whatever the subject was he seemed to change it.
He did precisely the same thing with me. For the best part of half an hour I tried to get from him the instructions I would have got from the Secretary of the Wicklow County Council in five minutes, but every time he evaded me. Finally the Angelus bell rang from the Franciscan church behind the court-house, and he slowly clambered on to his desk – a tall, old-fashioned desk like a lectern – joined his hands and closed his eyes. When I interrupted him again, he snapped at me angrily.
‘Ah, let me say my prayers!’ he said. And that was all the advice I ever got from the Secretary of the Cork County Council. I doubt if even Gogol would have been enough.
I went from him straight to the manager of the County Council bank and modestly asked to be allowed to open an account with the large cheque in my pocket.
‘When you produce a resolution signed by the chairman of your committee, Mr O’Donovan,’ the manager said coldly, practically implying I had stolen it.
I was distracted. Never in my life had I had a bank account or more money on a cheque than would pay my own small salary, but I did know that people deposited such cheques in a personal account, collected the interest and then later wrote a cheque for the original amount, and I was sure that sooner or later someone would accuse me of having stolen it. I knew one member of the County Council who had voted for my appointment, so I went to see him in his office in Patrick Street. He was a big fat man who had told me the story of his life – the publishable portions at least – when I went to solicit his vote, and I had liked him for it. As a boy his dream had been of becoming a great violinist, and he had practised in his room till he was found out and beaten by his mother.
Normally he moved slowly and apparently with great difficulty, but he moved like a bird when I told him my sad story.
‘Leave it to me, boy!’ he said in a sad, booming voice. ‘Leave it to me!’
He took me straight to his own bank and repeated the story to the manager. The manager, who obviously admired Mr Buckley, as I may call him, received me with Christian understanding and said there would be no difficulty; he would take it on himself; and when I left an account had been opened on behalf of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. I was very relieved and thanked my friend Mr Buckley. He told me that whenever I was in difficulty again I had only to call on him.
I suspect now that Mr Buckley knew very well the difficulty I was in and intended that I should remain in it. Before a week was over I had visits from a score of councillors who complained of my opening an account for a sub-committee of the County Council in an unauthorized bank. Obviously they did not believe my version of the incident.
By the time the County Council Secretary had done with organizing my sub-committee it consisted of a hundred and ten members, and anyone who has ever had to deal with a public body will realize the chaos this involved. Finally I managed to get my committee together in one of the large council rooms, and by a majority it approved my choice of bankers. There was, I admit, a great deal of heat. Some of the councillors felt I had acted in a very highhanded way, and one protested against my appearing in a green shirt – a thing which, he said, he would tolerate from nobody.
A general meeting of the County Council was being held at the same time in another part of the building. During the discussions I was exasperated by people banging on the doors at one side of the chamber we occupied.
Later I learned that (through an oversight no doubt) all the doors leading into the committee room from the Council Chamber had been locked, so that councillors who wished to oppose my choice of banker had been locked out and only those who knew the architecture of the building were in their seats on time.
By the time the next meeting was held the supporters of the County Council bank were staging a revolution. They accused me publicly of having had the doors of the committee room locked so that they could not arrive at the meeting on time. I was out of my wits, trying to understand. Several councillors tried to explain to me, but I didn’t understand their explanations. ‘You see,’ one would say in a whisper, ‘poor Murphy has an overdraft in the Banba Bank’, but I did not see why that should make him so angry with me. Another said that ‘Buckley is under the thumb of the Eire Bank’, but that did not make any sense to me either. It was all very confusing.
By that time other events had me more nonplussed than ever. The manager of the insurance company that handled the Council’s business had called. He was a very nice man, and he made no objection at all to insuring the library premises and stock. Here at last, I felt, was a really sensible man. But a week or two later I received by post a substantial cheque from the insurance company, and it was made out to me personally. I telephoned and was assured that it was perfectly all right. This was the commission on the insurance, and it was correctly made out to me. When I suggested that it should be made out to the Secretary of the Cork County Library Committee, the manager hastily said he would come over and explain it to me.
I have said he was a nice man, and he did his best for half an hour to make things clear to me, but that day I was denser than usual. The one thing I did gather was that the insurance company could not make out the cheque so that it could be lodged to the credit of the committee because this would be a great embarrassment to other officials. Considering the amount of property that other officials had to insure compared with the library premises, I saw that this might be so, but it didn’t help me about what I was to do with the cheque. The damn thing pursued me for years, and so did the insurance company, begging me either to cash the cheque or give it back. When I left the public service for ever twelve years later I still had it with me.
I really should have studied Gogol.
But if I didn’t know what was going on, other people did, or at least affected to do so. There was a small but determined group of old-fashioned Republicans on the Council which did its damnedest to have the Secretary fired, but whenever the battle was pitched the Secretary always won. I saw him at work myself, and his technique was fantastic. He could be dignified. When that failed he could clown, and there is nothing that the majority of men prefer to a clown. When the hunt became too fierce he would grab at a pile of correspondence and say, ‘Gentlemen, in connexion with what we are discussing, I have before me at this minute a letter from the Minister of Local Government’, and then proceed to read a letter which dealt with drainage in Ballymorebingham, and before anyone knew what was happening the representative from Ballymorebingham would be on his feet denouncing the Department of Local Government and taking the heat off the Secretary, who sat listening with an attentive air.
Then there was the County Council clerk, a small, gentle, inoffensive man, who had appointed himself Grand Inquisitor of Cork County Council. ‘I watch everything they do, Mr O’Donovan. Someone must clean out the Augean stables.’ Once a small businessman rang me up to ask when his account would be paid, and I replied that it had already been approved for payment a month before and sent to the Secretary for endorsement. He asked if I couldn’t get it speeded up, and I asked what the difficulty was in collecting it. He said in that hopeless Irish voice, ‘Look, I’d better come round and explain it to you’ – exactly as the insurance man had said. He came round to see me and I liked him at once though I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said that in order to get his cheque he would have to give somebody a hand-out. I didn’t know what he was talking about even then, and inquired why. He replied that every shopkeeper in Cork had to do it. At this I lost my temper and said I would ring up the Secretary’s office, and if his account was not paid within a week I would report the matter direct to the Department of Local Government. For a while he looked at me incredulously, and then he said, ‘Mr O’Donovan, if you could do that you would have every small shopkeeper in Cork on his knees before you.’ I did not have to do it, because immediately after my first telephone call the account was paid, so I never had the spectacle of the small shopkeepers of Cork on their knees before me to contemplate.
So naturally I didn’t pay too much attention to the little clerk, though he always managed somehow or other to meet me outside the office with fresh denunciations and fresh threats of reporting it all to the Minister. Perhaps it was just as well that I hadn’t had to protest to the Minister myself, for when the little clerk did report direct to the Minister for Local Government, he was promptly dismissed by sealed order. Left in middle age with nothing, the Grand Inquisitor set out for Dublin to live with his sister and devote his gentle, God-fearing life to showing up the Minister. When I moved to Dublin myself, he came along regularly to tell me how his great case against the Minister was going. Usually he came when I finished work and walked home with me, the happiest man in the world because he was sacrificing himself for the only thing he cared about – France. ‘Ever since I was a boy I have loved France,’ he would proclaim dramatically, stopping on the pavement and beaming at me. It was France he was dreaming of when he tried to tidy up the tangled affairs of the Cork County Council, France he was dreaming of when he switched his attention to the whole country.
I sometimes wanted to hug him as he trotted along beside me with his glowing face, happy and doomed. For I, too, wanted to do something about the country.
When at last I had got the library organized I realized that I had to have closer contact with the country branches. I bought a van to carry the book boxes about – I did not realize the necessity for a proper travelling library until this was under way – and Cronin, my assistant, and myself drove all over the country in it. This was another eye-opener. It made me realize that I was a townie and would never be anything else. In the best of the houses I visited – usually the houses of people who had been prominent in the Troubles – the people were better related to the wild country about them than I was to the tame city about me. Seeing them in Cork in their uncouth clothes with their uncouth accents was one thing; seeing them on their own farms was another thing entirely, and it made me conscious of my own uncouthness rather than theirs. But those families were few, and the total effect of the country on me was one of depression.
It was as much to escape from the unreality of my work as for any other reason that I started a dramatic society in the city. There had been no such thing since Corkery had organized his little theatre twenty years before. There was the Cork Operatic Society, which in the usual way of provincial societies performed a Gilbert and Sullivan opera once or twice a year, with the aid of an English producer. There was also a local Shakespearean Society, run by a priest, which performed Shakespeare with the dirty words left out. We held our drama meetings in the old Women’s Prison where Sean Neeson gave us space.
I knew even less about the theatre than I did about being a librarian, but I read and re-read every textbook on the subject and learned how to make scenery and organize the lighting – that is, if you could get a proper lighting set, which I never could, so that even today the one part of a production which I shall have nothing to do with is the lighting.
Our first production was to be Lennox Robinson’s Round Table – one of his functional comedies, which could be transferred to an English provincial production by the change of a few town names – his personal names were strictly inter-racial. I found suitable actresses very hard to get. The heroine is a determined bossy type, but that type seemed to be quite unknown to Ireland. The moment you put an Irish girl on the stage and told her to say: ‘Now, have you all washed your hands?’ she instantly realized that there was something slightly improper about addressing men in this tone and became either coy or wheedling. I did it for them, but that only made them more embarrassed than ever and they became practically tearful. I had just decided to give it up as a bad job when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a good-looking girl with an atrocious stammer. ‘W-w-w-would you m-m-m-m-mind t-terribly if I t-t-tried that part?’ she asked with a determined air. I decided that she was pulling my leg and said without looking round, ‘Well, you can’t be worse than the one that’s doing it.’ She got up and did it as though all her life she had been doing nothing else. Nancy McCarthy became my leading actress.
After this we produced The Cherry Orchard. I think I had been toying with The Playboy of the Western World because either then or soon afterwards we rehearsed it, but the results were too horrible. I realized during these rehearsals that a writer writes not only for a particular group; he writes for a particular accent. Everybody in Dublin suffers from adenoids, so Synge had no difficulty in finding actors who could sustain a long, unbroken line through speeches in the manner of Racine, but the Cork accent goes up and down, up and down, and I could find no actor or actress who could sustain a note even during a brief speech.
I had to be content with naturalism and even naturalism involved me in difficulties. One of the lessons I learned during The Cherry Orchard production was that my translation of the Russian names had not taken me far enough into the whole business of theatre. There were ‘versts’ and ‘roubles’, and, just as I did not know from my training as a librarian that the one thing I needed was to get into immediate communication with my readers, so as a budding man of the theatre I didn’t know that there is no way of getting an actor to say ‘verst’ and ‘rouble’ as though he knew exactly what it meant, nor is there any way of making contact with the audience except through its own knowledge of life. I saw it all quite clearly in that wonderful scene of the two sisters chattering in the dawn with the shepherd’s pipe sounding in the distance. The only trouble was that I had no method of making a sound like a shepherd’s pipe or, even if I had, of getting an audience to identify it as a shepherd’s pipe. I could not believe but that I could master that pipe and give the same unearthly effect to a Cork audience that it must have had for a Russian one. I still did not realize what I was to argue later, against Yeats and everyone else in Dublin, that theatre is a collaboration between author, actors and audience, and when that collaboration ceases to exist, theatre ceases to exist.
It is clear I didn’t recognize it then, because I went on with A Doll’s House. But from other things I was beginning to realize that Cork standards of literature and my own could not exist for long side by side. I had got a hint of this when our Ranevskaya confessed she couldn’t say the line ‘At your age you should have a mistress’. Then the young newspaperman who was playing the part of Firs supported her with his own argument. This was that, as the nephew of the Dean, he could not possibly tolerate such a line being spoken. I should have given up at that point, because the priest who conducted the Shakespearean Society was also attacking us in print and complaining that instead of the uplifting plays of Shakespeare we wanted to produce the filthy works of Sean O’Casey. As a result our leading man failed to turn up at the dress rehearsal. He sent a message that he had a toothache, and when one of the group went to his lodgings, it seemed that the toothache was so bad that he couldn’t come to the first night either. Hendrick had to postpone the show until Tuesday and that night he and Nancy worked for hours trying to teach me the part.
In those couple of years I published two or three stories, one of them, ‘Guests of the Nation’, in the Atlantic Monthly. Nevertheless, as I have said, I did not enjoy my years in Cork, because it was no longer the place I had known. O’Faolain was in America and I found it impossible to talk to Corkery. He was too gentle and considerate to be rude, but he made it plain that he was taking sides and that I was on the wrong one. I was restless and felt that Cork was threatening to suffocate me. I suffered from a sort of intellectual schizophrenia, living for the few days in the year when I could get up to Wicklow, talk literature and art to the Phibbses, and go on to Dublin and see Russell and Yeats. Russell could give me all the latest books and gossip, and of a Sunday evening I could go to the Abbey Theatre, where the Dublin Drama League was putting on a remarkable series of continental plays, Chekhov, Strindberg and contemporary German plays in which Phibbs’ friend, Denis Johnston, was a leading figure.
I had also fallen in love in a completely hopeless way with my leading lady in the dramatic society. I had been reading Chekhov’s love letters to Olga Knipper and probably felt I needed an actress of my own. Nancy was not in the least like Knipper. She was a pharmacist and very conscious of her responsibilities, and as well as that she was a very pious Catholic. When people complained of prescriptions she went to St Peter and Paul’s to pray. When they took legal proceedings she made a novena. For a year or more I always seemed to be meeting the girl outside St Peter and Paul’s. I gave her Chekhov’s letters to Knipper, but they seemed to have no effect. She just wouldn’t marry me.
Even so, when I applied for a job as municipal librarian in Dublin, I still had the notion that I should do it only as a temporary expedient until a similar job turned up in Cork. Nothing could cure me of the notion that Cork needed me and that I needed Cork. Nothing but death can, I fear, ever cure me of it.