Russell, who was full of Hegelianism, used to argue that Irish literature developed in pairs. There were himself and Yeats, then Stephens and Colum, then Austin Clarke and F. R. Higgins, and now Geoffrey Phibbs and I.
But Russell was an example of another sort of Hegelianism, which he did not observe at all. The rediscovery of Old Irish, on which the whole literary movement was based, had been made by German scholars. When the discovery spread to Ireland the remarkable group of philologists, Irish and German, who worked here was probably the best group of scholars the country had known in modern times, and isolated by their very eminence. When Irish writers such as Yeats and Synge began to make use of the material they unearthed, and wrote as nobody in Ireland had written since the ninth century, they in their turn were isolated, and the two groups were drawn together and existed in an extraordinary love-hate relationship. There were the highly improbable friendships of George Moore and Kuno Meyer, of George Moore and Richard Best, of John Synge and Best. ‘Moore didn’t know the English language at all,’ Best said. ‘Moore pointed to a passage in a book and said, “Best, this man is very ignorant. He writes, ‘It were better to say’.” I said, “Moore, that is not bad English. That is merely the subjunctive mood.” “Best,” he said, “what is the subjunctive mood?” I explained it to him, and he said, “But, Best, how wonderful! I shall never again use anything but the subjunctive mood.”‘
Best also explained that Synge didn’t know English, but I have forgotten what it was that Synge didn’t know. All I do remember is that Synge did not know how to make tea. ‘So I said to him, “Synge,” I said, “I will buy you a teapot,” and Synge asked, “Best, what is a teapot?”’ It would be fascinating to know what other strange discoveries great scholars and writers made about one another.
The truth is that they were friends without knowing why and without understanding the fierce resentments that sometimes blew up between them. They were the nearest thing in nature to the two sexes, for ever scouting about one another’s encampments and bringing back horrible tales of what went on in them. Best had the last word on ‘that fellow, Joyce’, whom everyone talked about. ‘He borrowed money from everyone in Dublin, but he never got a penny out of me.’
So it was quite natural that Russell should come to my flat with Osborn Bergin, the greatest of Irish scholars; that we should all meet on Sunday evenings at Russell’s and that Russell and I should drop in on Bergin. The only difference was that Russell and I both made tea, but Bergin provided no refreshments. Either he was too much of an ascetic or he was too afraid of his housekeeper.
On the river under the windows of my library at Ballsbridge I used to watch the romance of a swan who had lost his mate and had struck up an immoral relationship with a fussy little duck who was obviously thrilled to death by such a large, strange, beautiful husband. Whenever I watched that strange pair I used to think of Russell and Bergin.
Bergin was a prince of scholars, and the figure I think of whenever I re-read A Grammarian’s Funeral – who ‘gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, Dead from the waist down’ – though Bergin wouldn’t give you anything, not even a doctrine. ‘Bergin’s Law’, known to all serious philologists, was identified and named by his pupil D. A. Binchy, but Bergin himself never really believed in it. He was a small man with a neat brown beard and a face that varied between the stern and precise and the vague and vacuous. He usually wore a costume that had been fashionable among Irish nationalists at the time I was born – a tweed jacket, pantaloons and long cycling stockings – and he usually sat with his legs crossed and one eye half closed, making patterns in the air with his pipe. I used to follow the patterns with my eyes, feeling sure that his subconscious mind was writing messages of great significance in the air, if only I could interpret what they meant. Where Russell burbled, Bergin rasped. When he had a story to tell you he would pull his legs in under his chair, point at you with his pipe, and screw his face up. When we were alone in his house he would put down his pipe, pick up his old fiddle and play and sing Gaudeamus Igitur and other songs from his student days in Germany. His fiddling was worse than his voice, which was terrible.
On one subject he knew more than anybody in the world, and he could not bear to discuss it with more than perhaps five people – rather in the manner of the Lowells and Cabots, and if the God’s truth was known he probably thought the Cabots very unreliable. Robin Flower, a really fine scholar, he could not tolerate because Flower spoke Irish with an English accent – forgivable enough in an Englishman, one would have thought.
Nothing would persuade Russell, who knew no language but English, but that I was a formidable scholar too, since I had once, to his own knowledge, caught T. F. O’Rahilly out. O’Rahilly, second only to Bergin in scholarship, though not in crankiness, had a great grudge against Edmund Curtis, the historian, who reviewed books in Irish for Russell’s paper, the Irish Statesman, and he wrote abusive letters to Russell, suggesting that Curtis couldn’t read a page of Irish without a dictionary, till poor Curtis gave up. Russell conscripted me in his place, and in the first review I wrote I came a cropper that wouldn’t even have occurred to Curtis, and O’Rahilly wrote his usual letter of complaint, but with what for him was urbanity. He probably felt that if you must have devils you had better have them of your own making. By a coincidence, the very same week that O’Rahilly’s letter appeared I got one of his two beautiful anthologies of love poetry for review, and there was a mistake that even a child wouldn’t have made. I struggled hard with my conscience, because the book was so beautiful I merely wanted to enthuse and not bother with what to me was nonsense, so I finally ignored it. But I couldn’t resist writing to Russell to prove how noble I was, and Russell, walking forth (it was one of his favourite examples of the Economy of Nature that he was always talking about), met Bergin, who read my letter with the air of a Lowell being told of a Cabot solecism by a Boston Biddy. ‘Nature’ must have been working overtime that day because the first person Bergin ran into was O’Rahilly and, in the true Lowell spirit, he showed O’Rahilly the note he had taken. That night, coming on to midnight, O’Rahilly was pounding on Bergin’s door, almost in tears, with the cry of ‘But I had it right in proof, Bergin! I had it right in proof!’ Bergin went round next evening to tell Russell, and Russell wrote to me next morning.
Ah, me! But after that O’Rahilly sent me his works, and was. delighted when Thurneysen and I in acknowledging one of them used exactly the same words, Thurneysen in German and I in English. Is it any wonder I enjoyed scouting round the scholars’ encampments for what I could bring home in the way of gossip?
But Bergin could not trust a man capable of making a mistake like that. One night, he and I were walking home from Russell’s, and I told him I was uncertain of the meaning of one verse in O’Rahilly’s second anthology of love poetry. I got a very short answer: ‘Couldn’t say without seeing the text.’ But I was getting used to Bergin’s ‘Don’t knows’ and ‘Can’t imagines’ and I produced the book. Bergin took it with great politeness and loathing and stopped under the nearest gas-lamp to read. Having read the verse I didn’t understand, he turned the page to the beginning of the poem and read it right through. Then he turned back the page and did it again. Finally he closed the book and handed it back to me. ‘I’m always telling O’Rahilly not to publish manuscripts he doesn’t understand,’ he said in a dead voice, and after that he said no more.
He had such a horror of inaccuracy that he avoided the risk of it by never speaking anything but English, except when he was reminiscing, and had it all, as you might say, pat. Once in explaining to me his dislike of the Germans, he described an incident of his student days when he and a French student named Etienne went to register as aliens. ‘Osborn Bergin’ sounded a good Teutonic name, so he had no trouble, but when it came to the French boy’s turn the policeman said flatly, ‘Etienne, das ist kein Name.’ According to Bergin, this had given him a hatred of Germans that had lasted throughout his life. When I protested, he said gloomily, ‘There are only two tones in the German voice, the whine and the bellow. They’re whining now; the bellow will come later.’ (This was before Hitler.) I, having no culture at all except what I had picked up from German, protested again, but he crushed me brutally. ‘Binchy’ (then our ambassador in Germany) ‘says the Germans are a people you keep on trying to like.’ That settled that, too. God alone knows what Binchy did say, but this is what Bergin felt he should have said, and it was said on his behalf.
When Bergin and Best went to Germany in later years, Bergin refused to speak German at all, and he let the unfortunate Best struggle with the problem of transport and currency without once opening his mouth. But when Best in Cologne station, having asked Bergin for some small change and got nothing but a scowl, told the railway porter, ‘Ich habe nicht Geld’, outraged majesty recovered sufficiently to rasp ‘Ich habe KEIN Geld!’ Everybody in Ireland knew the story of how, when he stood over the grave of his old friend Father Peter O’Leary, he glanced at the breastplate of the coffin and muttered ‘Four mistakes!’ but I suspect I was the only person ignorant or innocent enough to challenge him with it. When I did, he merely cocked one eye, made figures on the air with his pipe and muttered. ‘Well, I didn’t make the mistakes, did I?’
He was rather friendlier to the French than to the Germans, and I suspect that if only he could have spoken their language in a way that satisfied his own standards he would have enthused about them. He used to tell with glee a story of Meyer’s, who had been with some other scholars at the house of a French philologist and discussed the disappearance of final consonants in the language. The host’s old father listened with horror to those blasphemies about his native language, because he knew that final consonants had not disappeared, and at last he whispered in anguish to Meyer, ‘Ne le’ croye’ pa’, m’sieu! I’ ne sav’ pa’ ce qu’i’ di’.’
And yet, because I loved him, I knew Bergin was a fiercely emotional and possessive man, consumed with obscure abstract hatreds. I know now what I did not realize at the time – what it was that Russell and he had in common. Both were European figures who in their hearts had never ceased to be anything but small-town boys. When Russell was moved he reverted to the Lurgan Orangeman, and when Bergin was moved he reverted to the Cork Gaelic Leaguer. It was an experience to lunch with him and Tadhg O’Donoghue of University College, Cork, who didn’t seem to me to have an idea in his good-looking head, though Bergin put on more of a performance for him than he did even for Russell. Bergin had once been Secretary of the Leeside Branch of the Gaelic League in Cork, which had had a disagreement with the Governing Body in Dublin, and when Bergin talked of his disagreement, then forty years old, he became almost incoherent with anger. I never discovered what the Governing Body was supposed to have done, though I listened to the story several times.
Another of his hatreds was George Moore, who, in his usual petulant way, had said to him one night at Best’s, ‘Oh, Bergin, you bore me!’ to which Bergin had retorted, ‘I am as much entitled to bore you, Mr Moore, as you are to bore me.’ When a man repeats years later the crushing retort he has made, you can be sure that he was badly hurt, and judging by the way Bergin repeated it he must have wanted a writer of his own as badly as Moore wanted a scholar, and felt about Moore’s behaviour as a man feels when told by a girl he had been in love with that he was no good as a lover.
His third detestation was Yeats, who, according to Bergin, had insulted him during a meeting of the Dublin Literary Society. ‘Dr Bergin, are there any astrological manuscripts in Irish?’ Yeats had asked, and Bergin had replied, ‘Not to my knowledge, Mr Yeats.’ Yeats had then deliberately turned away in his chair. It was no good telling Bergin that Yeats had probably turned away to meditate on the question of whether the British Government or the Catholic Church had destroyed the manuscripts. Bergin knew it was an insult intended for him.
But his greatest rancour was reserved for his old friend Joseph O’Neill, a good Celtic scholar, who had been a fellow student of his in Germany. O’Neill – one at least of whose donnish romances will be remembered – married a literary woman, who – again according to Bergin – was always talking of ‘Peguy and Proust’ and getting the pronunciation wrong – a major offence in anyone but an intimate friend. (When I quoted in German or French Bergin contented himself with following me soundlessly on his lips.)
The O’Neills dropped Bergin, ‘a man who couldn’t dance either literally or metaphorically’, and he resented it fiercely, all the more because Russell replaced him as the O’Neills’ best friend, and over the years he made O’Neill the butt of scholarly jokes and poems. The verse squibs began with their student days in Germany and O’Neill’s passion for stories of the Wild West:
Buffalo Bill war ein Mann, he read,
In des Wortes bester Bedeutung, oh!
They described O’Neill’s days as a school inspector – ‘Holy nuns would give him tea, priests would give him dinner’ – and described him at his first public function:
When Gaily was young he had more sense
Than to follow the fiddler and waste his pence.
Dancing reels on a Galway strand;
He was saving his feet for a Free State band.
Heyho, Gallio dancing,
Slithering, sliding, prancing!
Heyho, Gallio dancing,
Dancing at a Free State ball.
And when Russell (who lived round the corner from both O’Neill and Bergin) reached San Francisco, there was a savage little note waiting for him that read: ‘Please remember me to Joseph O’Neill.’
Russell and Bergin were both lonely men, and there was nothing to indicate that one was a widower and the other a bachelor but the fact that the bachelor’s house didn’t look as though it needed cleaning. Each week they went together to the local cinema and they carted detective stories to one another’s houses. In his days as editor Russell could glut himself on whodunits, but now he was often hard up for something to read, and as a librarian I was able to help. Lit up by the discussion of some new gimmick in Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, Russell would expand on the great detective story he would write, called ‘The Murder of a Celtic Scholar’, with Bergin as principal suspect, though the victim might be Agnes O’Farrelly, Douglas Hyde or even Eoin MacNeill, a fine historian, but ‘quite unscrupulous with his sources’, according to Bergin. Those were delightful evenings, though when they came to me it took a full week to get rid of the stink of their tobacco. Each year they got someone to drive them into the country, collected masses of coltsfoot, dried it on trays before their windows and then ground it up to mix with their tobacco.
They were always making mystifying little jokes at one another’s expense. If it wasn’t ‘The Murder of a Celtic Scholar’, it was Bergin’s ‘If A.E. had written the Odyssey’, a neat little twelve-line lyric in Russell’s vaguest manner, which summed up the epic. then it was Russell writing to Bergin as he crossed the Mississippi, ‘which at this point is a mile wide’, and Bergin’s reply, ‘Aristotle says an animal a mile long could not be beautiful, but please don’t quote me because I haven’t the text before me.’ This was reported back to me by Russell with the comment, ‘Isn’t that just like dear Osborn?’
But in spite of all the joking Russell was very perturbed by the rumour that dear Osborn had written love poetry in Irish which, some friends had told him, was very passionate indeed. I tried to reassure him, but he wasn’t satisfied. Russell had wanted a scholar for a friend, and if it now turned out that Bergin was really a wild romantic poet whose word no man could rely on it would be worse than not knowing what to do with his Sunday afternoons. One night he came to my flat, bristling.
‘I was at Curran’s last night,’ he began, without preliminaries, as he did only when he was upset. ‘He says Bergin has a poem in all the anthologies which is very passionate. Have you got it? Could you translate it for me? I want to know what it’s like.’ Of course, I knew it by heart. It was part of the anthology of bad verse I had memorized in the days when I couldn’t afford books. It was the plague of Bergin’s life, because nobody reprinted it correctly, and it had almost begun to seem that nobody could, as though it had a jinx on it. Bergin had had a circular drawn up, embodying the correct text and demanding a proof.
I translated out of my head for Russell, and after the first few lines he began to stroke his beard and beam like a lover being reassured of his girl’s fidelity. ‘All literary convention!’ he murmured joyously. ‘I knew it! I knew our Osborn had never been in love!’ (In which, of course, he was wrong, because our Osborn had been very much in love with one of his students; an American girl he had pursued, even abroad; but we cut our friends to suit our needs, and Russell needed a scholar rather than another poet.) So the two elderly men went on happily adoring one another.
Yeats was madly jealous of Russell’s scholar and would have given anything to possess one of his own. Nothing would have pleased him better than to be able to say, ‘My friend Bergin, the greatest living philologist, tells me…’ But, anyway, Bergin wouldn’t have told him the time of day. Except among the Lowells and Cabots he never talked of his own subject except to say, ‘Don’t know’, ‘Can’t tell’, or ‘Too obscure for me’. He knew I was crazy to learn Old Irish, but the only contribution he ever made to my knowledge of it was when he took Strachan and O’Keeffe’s edition of The Cattle Raid of Cooley from a shelf one night and murmured, ‘Em. Very clean!’
He wasn’t at all the dry stick one must make him appear if one is to get the real biscuity Bergin flavour. As with Russell, there was under the urbanized exterior the emotional volcano of the provincial town. Mother adored him, and used to sit at the window, watching for his arrival, so that she could be the first to welcome him. He told her stories of Cork and liked listening to her stories of it. Yeats, of course, either hadn’t heard of Cork or didn’t think much of it. One night when Bergin was in the flat with us a knock came at the door and she went to answer. A moment later she appeared in the room, looking like a ghost and with her hands in the air. ‘Michael!’ she cried. ‘Yeats!’ Then she rushed off to her bedroom, where Yeats couldn’t get at her. Yeats, embarrassed by his extraordinary reception, came in looking shyer than ever, and Bergin completed his confusion. Bergin had only to see Yeats to remember that monstrous scene at the Dublin Literary Society.
Yeats and I talked for a few minutes and the name of George Moore came up. Bergin grunted, and Yeats’ spirits began to rise, because he began to discern that however much Bergin hated him, he hated Moore worse; and many a dear friendship has begun on nothing more substantial than a common enmity. I could see he was thinking that he might yet acquire a scholar of his own, for he burst into the wonderful series of malicious anecdotes that later appeared in Dramatis Personae along with a number of scabrous ones that haven’t appeared anywhere yet.
Bergin was exceedingly vulnerable in his sense of humour, particularly when it concerned a man who had the audacity to say that Bergin bored him. First he chuckled, then he laughed, and finally he was rolling round on the sofa, hysterical with laughter. I had never seen Yeats put on such a performance for anyone before, and I accompanied him to the tramcar in a glow of love and admiration for both of them.
But when I returned, one look at Bergin was enough to dissipate the charm. He was sitting on the sofa, scowling, despising Yeats, despising me for permitting a man like that into the house, but most of all despising himself for the weakness of character that had made him sacrifice his dignity for the sake of a few funny stories. He was already casting himself as Browning’s ‘Lost Leader’ – ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us’.
‘Isn’t he a great old card?’ I said as enthusiastically as I could.
‘He’s a great old cod,’ Bergin snapped, without looking at me, and for the rest of the evening I couldn’t even get a civil answer out of him.
A scholar’s work is often as much a self-portrait as a writer’s. Osborn Bergin loved Irish professional poetry of the late Middle Ages, and to those who knew him the poems give back a reflection of the man. Many of them belong to the Elizabethan period, which was the last great period of Irish love poetry, but it was characteristic of Bergin that he left all that to O’Rahilly. He edited only Cu Chonnact O Cléirigh’s Ní mé bhur n-aithne, a aos gráidh, and that only because he found it ‘mysterious’, which it is not, except for the fact that the passion becomes lost in the conceit.
One cannot imagine his friend Kuno Meyer editing them. Meyer was the romantic scholar, and he fell upon the earlier poetry with a freshness and joyousness that can still be felt in his translations, which are all the more remarkable because they are translations from one foreign language into another. According to Bergin, Meyer carried his translations round with him, ready to read to anyone of literary sensitiveness who could produce the perfect word for him. One cannot imagine Bergin doing that. His scholarship was superior to Meyer’s and his translations are more exact, but it is the exactness of prose rather than verse. D. A. Binchy tells the story of an English student of Bergin’s who once asked in exasperation, ‘But what is it all about?’ Bergin replied evenly, ‘I will give you an exact translation of the words.’ And that, too, is characteristic. Even in his choice of words Meyer tries to tell you ‘what it is all about’; Bergin gives you the exact prose equivalent and allows you to work out the rest for yourself.
As a result his prose is sometimes more difficult than the verse he is translating. In that beautiful poem on the death of his wife, Muireadhach O’Daly wrote:
Beag an cion do chúl na ngéag
A héag ó a fior go húr óg.
Bergin translates: ‘Little was the fault [or affection] of the branching tresses that she should die and leave her husband while fresh and young.’ But whether cion means ‘fault’ or ‘affection’ it would be more polite to translate: ‘It was no blame to the girl of the branching tresses’ or maybe even ‘It was small desire the girl of the branching tresses had to die’.
It was not that Bergin was insensitive to what the Irish said. On the contrary, he merely believed, as he said himself, that they were as untranslatable as an ode of Horace. When I took him up on this, and translated ‘A Winter Campaign’ into the pseudo-Horatian metre of Marvell, he ignored both the compliment and the criticism, and I gathered I had committed lèse-majesté. He was touchy about any slighting remark regarding the poems themselves. Once, when I had mentioned them in the same breath with the verbose eighteenth-century poets, he replied stiffly, ‘Those men were aristocrats and scholars.’ He liked the aristocratic flavour, but even more he loved the neatness, the order, the scholarship, and the feeling of an Oxford common-room.
That strongly donnish note existed in Irish poetry from the beginning, but in these poems it is at its strongest because the world they knew was collapsing in ruin about its authors. I think Bergin liked to remember that even in the days when earth was falling, ‘the day when earth’s foundations fled’, these Irish professional poets continued to count their syllables, and admitted no word, no grammatical form, which their masters of two hundred years before would not have approved. Like other artists, he identified himself with his subject, for he was one of the last of a great generation of scholars in a country where scholarship was no longer regarded.