AH, BUT YOU DON’T KNOW DUBLIN. Where battles and surprises never end. And if they seemingly do, beware of enjoying victory. Friendship is on the lips but not in the heart. And just as one has completed heaping an unrelenting stream of praise upon John Ryan, I have occasion to look through some ancient files and letters. And there, by God, in handwritten black and white are statements reported to me from the Dublin of the period. These being scurrilous anecdotes and gossipy ridicule heaped upon me by the princeling John Ryan himself. And why not. It would make people listen to what you were saying. And it may be why in the Dublin of the time that most stories began with a reference to male weakness and ended with an old Gaelic refrain: “Wasn’t your impotent man stark naked at the time, and in an equal state of undress was your woman feverish with desire, and alas the poor lady lingers not knowing the Gael fucks only with his fingers.”
But it was not only John Ryan who was my first so-called contact with the literary world. There was briefly one other, and a Gael about whom the above refrain could never refer. I’d submitted a poem to the literary magazine called The Bell, for whom worked an editor called Harry Craig. Like my paintings, the poem was vaguely promising and began with the line “Soon and off the earth” and ended four or five verses later with “where the weary wind bewilders me.” Craig, a man of immense charm and gentility, walked into Davy Byrnes pub and upon being introduced, mentioned that he remembered the poem and intended to publish it, and hoped that I had kept a copy because Brendan Behan, sheltering overnight in the Bell office, used a sheaf of manuscripts which included my poem to burn in the fireplace in order to cook his sausages for breakfast.
This pub became the first of the many one was to frequent, and I found myself within its precincts within an hour on my first social foray out in the city as a Trinity student. Fifty or so yards away eastward down the street at the top of a Georgian house was another venue to which carefully selected customers repaired to dine and party away the rest of the night when this pub closed.
Now it was no revelation to me that Dublin was full of people trying to teach you a once-and-for-all lesson not to try to be a novelist, but they would always indulge you a bit while longer if you wanted to be a poet. However, Harry Craig was in Ireland my very first kindly admirer of one’s writing. A Protestant clergyman’s son and product of Trinity College, he was a gracious and compassionate man. And as he now lies peacefully dead, I’m sure he won’t mind my saying just this little bit about him. He was referred to as having the looks of a Greek god. This description more likely came from and was circulated among the many homosexuals who at the time flocked to Dublin from every corner of the globe. But none of these gentlemen got a chance to get near Harry as he was besieged by women of all ages and description. And one of them, a very attractive and socially prominent English lady who favored to have love made to her while standing on her head, monopolized Harry’s time. Being that Harry, of splendid physique and an outstanding athlete, was able to accomplish this while himself quaffing back a pint of stout. But for other more conservative ladies, Harry did have a handicap which hung at great length between his legs. Which observation, the English lady, who indulged her nymphomania, spread all over Dublin, with the result that Harry Craig’s literary opinions were avidly listened to. And why not, for on this isle of saints and scholars, with the people so devout, this overadequacy of a monstrously big prick would be thought nobody’s fault but God’s.
Plus in the Dublin of the time, private parts, as much taboo as they were in public discussion, were much discoursed upon behind closed doors, where such might prove embarrassing for their owner. In any event and sad to say, the socially prominent English lady finally suffered a serious head injury in one of her sexually gymnastic sessions, leaving Harry Craig still having the looks of a Greek god and the body to go with it, a fatal attraction to the remaining women who flung themselves at him in order to cling to him for life. But nothing could stop the rumor that between his legs hung the biggest penis in Ireland, necessitating that Harry’s seductions be carried out in darkness as more than one lady, seeing the instrument about to penetrate her, ran for her life. Indeed, outside any chamber wherein Harry was known to be honeymooning with a recent lady, there always gathered a curious group awaiting to see if, when Harry was having at her, there would be a scream and the lady would come fleeing out. Which once gave rise to a false alarm when Harry and a visiting Austrian countess for whose seduction he had rented a flat and had for the occasion recently painted in duck-egg blue, and wherein the overwhelming smell of paint gave them such headaches that they both came reeling out. Leaving the curiosity seekers who’d then followed them to a nearby hotel, scratching their own heads.
Being arranged before an exhibition in Dublin, my pictures are leaning outside and are hung on the wall inside my Kilcoole studio. My nerve and American brashness served me well in this endeavor, which for all my ineptitudes was serious enough to become a lifelong occupation.
In Dublin I had now become a painter notorious for my nerve producing risqué female nudes with your normal pubic hair and exhibiting several still wet canvases. Such activities did get publicity, but selling only a handful of pictures at knockdown prices made me not much richer. And now, desperate to avoid a lifetime of nine-to-five employment and on the verge of marriage with Valerie, we both had gone to visit with her parents in Ilkley. Where one was now much at the mercy of their hospitality, which was, to say the least, lavish and unstinting but did not put a penny in my threadbare pocket, albeit I was still subsisting on my good mother’s monthly emolument. But for all the begrudgements and treachery abounding in Dublin, there was still one man upon whom you could trust your life. And totally out of the blue Tony McInerney, by returning money I’d lent him nearly a year before, saved me from a fatal embarrassment of not being able to afford to buy a wedding ring. And the welcome fivers were sent with a cryptic message: “I’ll bet in a million years you never thought you would ever get this.”
One might cringe a bit in embarrassment at my efforts to look gladly sincere on my wedding day, but never married before I was indeed delighted with my new wife, Valerie, who proved with homemade potted meat for breakfast that she could make life extremely pleasant.
In my utterly penurious state, the windfall at least enabled me to take Valerie to Bradford, where at the city’s elite jeweler, a plain platinum ring was bought. However, the fact that I had not a pot to piss in, must have become apparent to my future mother-in-law, who conducted her mild and brief cross-examination in the privacy of their Ilkley house kitchen, to which I had been summoned and where Mrs. Heron inquired as to my prospects and assets. The then slightly vague account I gave was honest enough and, although evasive, was at least optimistically sunny. But one, as an American, feeling somewhat above all that kind of thing, took exception to this inquiry. I was in any case smitten with the beautiful and charming Valerie and had no intentions of her starving and was in fact a little bit shocked that such subject should ever be brought up. However, my prospective in-laws had envisioned that both their daughters should marry into a Yorkshire merchant’s or mill owner’s dynasty, whose sons had already been a long time avidly pursuing. But the Heron parents, having had enough difficulty over a previous marriage of their eldest beautiful daughter, had now more or less given up the battle to prevent marriage to someone thought not quite good enough.
The small town of Ilkley, housing textile magnates and industrialists from Bradford and Leeds, was situated in the valley of the Wharfe River and was surrounded by its moors and was originally a spa and had now become a considerably rich residential enclave to which my father-in-law had finally gravitated as he achieved affluence. With tinned food and refrigeration banned from the household because they diminished flavor, there was an extensive cold cellar brimming with beer, cheeses and such things as potted meat for breakfast and vaults of vintage wine. Riverdale, as the house was called, was a cornucopia. Over the snooker table, port and cigars followed dinner, and chocolates were available in front of the sitting room fire. But now old man Heron was confined to his rosewood and exotically etched glass-paneled and deep-carpeted bedroom. Occasionally still smoking and drinking his vintage champagne and reminding anyone who might listen of his rise from rags to riches. And I listened.
Old man Heron was not regarded with awe by his children, who would tolerate the largess but would sheepishly try to avoid his stories. Especially his son, Michael, who viewed life in more romantic terms and, groomed to take over his father’s expanding business, had been sent on the grand tour during which he learned many languages as well as how to sample all of Europe’s luxuries. But upon his return to Bradford, Michael could not stomach the world of textiles. Now, as old man Heron’s children’s lives unfolded and the prospect of grandchildren loomed, he would comment as he saw it, concerning the family’s clogs-to-clogs transition in three generations, having had himself descended from a former family of some status who had lost their engineering business and grown up in a back-to-back house in a working-class district of Bradford. But the Yorkshire brand of person is a resolute and hardy one. And in the pollutants of his industrial cities, little him dismay. As might be drawn from the oft said words,
“Where there’s muck, there’s money.”
Starting out in wool trade as a messenger boy, old man Heron vowed to make his way back up in the world. As a music lover, he taught himself to play the violin and his lunchtime leisure moments were spent each day at the free outdoor band concerts, where he stood listening at the back of the last row of seats. And with each passing year, as he continued to be promoted and had now joined a prominent textile firm, he was able to improve his comforts and pay a threepenny bit for a hard seat and then thrupence for a deck chair and finally was not only able to pay for his seat but also to buy a program. Independently, he began making up his own batch of gabardine raincoats, which he went selling at night door-to-door, and then became manager of the silk department and ultimately a director of this prestigious textile concern.
During the war the cloth trade was static and old man Heron’s moment of business triumph came one day out of the blue at a board meeting. His fellow directors of the company complaining of his not appearing at his office until long after ten A.M. each day and disappearing for lunch before one P.M., when he was not to be seen again till the next morning. His habit had become to go have a slap-up pub lunch of splendid meat pie and two pints of ale, followed by a leisurely afternoon at the cinema. Upon Heron hearing the complaint, he immediately called a board meeting and for the firm’s accountants to produce the firm’s books. Heron then pointed out that his department was the only department that had made any profit in the past two years and that he was in fact carrying the entire firm. Under the threat of resigning, he asked for an apology from the every member of the board who in turn stood up and apologized. Upon accepting the apologies, old man Heron then rose to his own feet and announced,
“Gentlemen, I appreciate your change of heart, but I feel that such has come about under a certain duress. Therefore, I consider it appropriate to resign. And hereby resign. And a very good day and good-bye to you all.”
That same afternoon, Heron emptying his desk and files, assembled his credentials and went with these to his bank manager. Whereupon that same day he had raised enough money to start his own firm, which in turn soon became more prosperous than the one he had just left and made him a substantially rich man.
These stories of old man Heron’s life were told to me as he lay sick in bed in his considerable splendor, enduring his last illness. Each day, with what was persisting of my ebullient American optimism and unquenchable unconquerability, I’d play him in chess and comment upon his painting, which he’d taken up at my behest and had mastered nearly overnight. In turn he tried to teach me about the stock market and how to calculate the yield on a stock, which somehow, even as a student reading honors natural science and taught physics by E.T.S. Walton, who along with Lord Rutherford were the first men ever to split the atom, I failed to fathom. He must have only vaguely held this against me, as he later said to his wife, who remained more dubious concerning my future,
“That boy will go far.”
I was relieved and pleased to hear this, as his valued opinion agreed with mine. And especially as at the time, the simple wedding that Crist had urged and highly approved of was about to come to pass. The momentum gathered from the suspicion that Valerie and I were already living together. And on a windy day with squalls of rain, the marriage ceremony was in fact pleasant enough, although my smile in the photographs seemed posed. Valerie was bought a large hat by her mother, and I wore a gray flannel suit. Michael Heron, who occasionally enjoyed proprieties, pinned roses on lapels and was best man and carried a vase of tulips to be put on the desk in the small Guiseley registry office a few miles from Ilkley, where the woman registrar read the vows and requested the fee of twelve shillings. The maids, Freda and Mary, set a wedding feast of cold chicken in lemon sauce. Bedridden as he was, old man Heron had no longer any need to climb up into the third floor of the house to try and catch Valerie and I in bed together, but did expertly open a magnum of champagne.
Luckily our honeymoon was a present and already generously paid, for following the purchase of the wedding ring, I remained abysmally broke. A hired chauffeured car took us up to the small hamlet of Kettlewell in the Dales to a tiny hotel, where, arriving in the dark, we were the only guests. The bedroom was lit by candlelight and had a large four-poster bed, and the windows overlooked a rushing stream. There was nothing to do nor anywhere to go except up on the moors, where, in my only pair of shoes, I soaked my feet. I bought myself a walking stick and attempted to make the best of the situation, and by evenings went tapping my way through the silent village after dark. Although not a soul was to be seen, this innocent air I’d suddenly adopted seemed to embarrass Valerie. But this little tribulation of the time at least distracted my attention from other worries. And to this day, I feel out of uniform without a walking stick.
My mother-in-law, with her organizational skills admired by many, had during the war become an impressive lady in the community, running an enormous catering canteen. And upon our return from our brief honeymoon, a cocktail party was thrown. The Herons’ friends and relatives, most of whom were wool merchants and mill owners, arrived. Over the years, old man Heron had traditionally given, as a wedding present to the children of any of his friends who married, a set of dinner silverware. Early in the evening I’d been invited into Mr. Heron’s bedroom, where, with the words “I’m not going to give you any advice,” he handed me a slip of paper which turned out to be a check. For some reason, which has now become a habit of mine, I failed to look at or read what I assumed were modest numerals reflecting a gesture of goodwill from a hardened businessman. Valerie, in the privacy of the hallway, had no such daft sentimentality about the check stuffed in my pocket and asked immediately to see it. And the numerals turned out to be of a considerably large dimension.
Guests downstairs were now arriving in numbers. Being that the party was so impromptu, it was apparent that everyone in this rich community of Ilkley thought it was a shotgun marriage. Nor did Mrs. Heron dissuade them from so thinking. And none had a chance to buy a vase, dish or silver serving spoon. Instead each discreetly handed over their vellum envelopes containing these simple pieces of paper describing cash sums drawn on your better banks and which now made a substantial sheaf of envelopes in my hand. Upon Valerie calling for another accounting, it was apparent that from abject penury of only an hour or two before, one now stood possessed of modest riches. And returning to the din of the cocktail party in the deep-carpeted, rosewood-paneled front lounge of this house, I listened with animated interest to these guests and their friendly phrases, but all of whom I suspected regarded me with the deepest of deep suspicions. There having been before me a few impostors and mountebanks, some of whom in the confusion of the war were sporting double-barreled surnames and mythically alluding to their titled uncles and who attempted to wheedle their way into this mercantile prosperity, which established the social hierarchy of this town of Ilkley on Ilkley moor. However, I made no effort whatever to be anything but the reasonably nice American young man I hoped I was, born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx.
Ah, but even with these heaven-sent funds dropping out of the Ilkley sky, my optimism was soon to reverse upon me. From Liverpool and over the tossing Irish Sea, Valerie and I set sail again for Ireland on the mail boat. This journey so often taken amid belligerent drunken passengers, with the ship’s public rooms dense with cigarette smoke, decks splattered with vomit and the boat itself rearing, rolling and pitching, which could leave you tottering and seasick for days afterward. And it was no wonder that more than occasionally a passenger, in seeking relief, would empty his pockets, neatly place the contents on the deck for identification, with a quid or two left for his heirs, and then blessing himself would leap over the ship’s railings and plummet down into the dark waves. Once, having witnessed this being done, my sympathies were such for those haplessly returning to Ireland that I hesitated some seconds before alerting a member of the ship’s company. Alas, I needn’t have worried, this very tidy gentleman jumping was not rescued and never found.
Arriving early morning on the Dublin quays was never an event to set your heart beating with delight. There was little shelter or sustenance to be found before nine A.M. in a shut Dublin. As ladies were forbidden past six P.M. in a student’s rooms, except with special permission to attend the reading room, Valerie spent the day to find us accommodation. Evening came and I went with her to Castlewood Avenue, Rathmines, a suburban area not that far from the center of the city. Going up the stairs of this modest-sized terraced house to a narrow front room, I was incredulous that people rented such tiny space to live in, where there was only a stove and a basin and one had to go outside into a communal hall to the bath and to the water closet past other doors which led to other rooms where other strangers lurked inside. Leaving no mystery as to why men build their palaces and stately homes and surround them with parklands to keep your stranger strange and as far away as possible from any proximity. And more power to such chaps.
My responsibility as a husband to support another and the thought that this is what can happen to human beings overwhelmed me. The effect on me being almost impossible to believe for someone having been through two war years of rough and a certain amount of tumble in the U.S. Navy, where one occupied barracks or crew’s quarters aboard ship, and where dozens of men shared latrines and slept in open proximity. That one could be so vulnerable and that a Dublin bed-sitting-room should send me reeling back, stunned, to my rooms at Trinity took me entirely by surprise. And was probably the result of my background and the security one must have got used to growing up in what was the equivalent of a small-town suburban community in America and better known on maps as Woodlawn on the north borders of the Bronx, and where and within these handful of crisscrossing streets there had never been any serious degree of dismay in terms of living space or freedom.
Valerie left in Castlewood Avenue, as I lay back on the bed in my darkened Trinity rooms, gloomily contemplating the possible dreadful squalor that might befall me and staring at the ceilings, my heart took to pounding in such agitated manner that I thought I was having a heart attack. Struggling up from bed, I feebly dressed and hobbled down the couple of flights of stairs and faltering in front of the entrance of number 38, I looked for help in the silent empty quad of New Square. Suddenly in the dark, I spied two students exiting from their rooms and shouted for assistance. Trinity was renowned for its pranksters and mischief makers, some of whom could be extremely devilish and once in the past had even caused the death of a junior dean, and these two gentlemen of the college were quick to assume that someone was attempting a leg pull. I could, I thought, as they recognized me, even see anticipatory smiles breaking out on their faces. All of which necessitated my sounding even more plaintive in my cry for help. And especially so as I was known for being able to give a good account of myself in Dublin’s frequent pub battles, when I might even issue a preliminary war whoop as I entered the fray.
Stumbling forward, I had now reached and grasped the chain encircling the flat green velvet grass of the quad. As my knees buckled, I made an extreme effort to sound my last gasp loud enough so that it could convincingly be heard. My portrayal of imminent collapse must have finally persuaded them of my plight, and the two quickened their pace to my aid.
“Thank you, thank you, I do believe I may be having a heart attack.”
Now there were frowns rather than smiles on their faces as rain began to fall and they supported me under the arms out of New Square and across the cobbles of Front Square to the porter’s lodge at the front gates. Dying students were not a too common occurrence as were drunken ones, but both could be treated in the same fashion, and a taxi to take me away was called. Of the two assisting gentlemen, one hailed from the north of Ireland and played college rugby and in his later professional life became a member of the British parliament. It was many years afterward when I again heard his chuckling voice just behind me as I climbed the steps of Sotheby’s auction house in London’s Bond Street.
“I say there, Donleavy, do you need any help.”
But back upon this night and dispatched in a taxi to a Trinity College-affiliated hospital, I collected Valerie from the bed-sitter so that she could at least hear of my last wishes and the psalms to be selected sung at my obsequies. I was received staggering into the accident room, empty at the time, where the young interning doctor from Trinity’s medical school and whose face I knew by sight, placed a stethoscope all over my chest. He tapped and listened and listened again. He even made me open my mouth and go “ahhha.” His exhaustive examination concluded, he frowned and pronounced, “Quite frankly, there may be something wrong, but I can’t find it. All I find is that you may be the best physical specimen I have ever examined. Your heart, as far as I am concerned, is in splendid condition.”
Of course I had been on occasion able to run a timed practice mile in four minutes and twenty seconds. However, upon this eventful night, I still wasn’t entirely convinced that I was in monumentally splendid health, but certainly I was now able to put one foot in front of the other and cautiously make my way out into the world again with the thought that my heart would hold out that little bit longer. With a bemused Valerie, I returned to the bed-sitter, and from this constricted lodgings was ready to do untold battle in the momentous struggle I envisioned was ahead that would ensure I would escape such rooms forever. Meanwhile, news of my collapse and impending death was already all over the college and a concerned solicitous get-well-soon letter was awaiting me as I arrived back at my rooms which had been sent by my tutor, the eminent Greek scholar William Bedell Stanford, whom I’m sure could have encapsulated my plight in an appropriate Hellenic homily. For he, years later upon being interviewed, contradicted nearly all opinions about me. And was quoted as saying, “I know he may have had a reputation of some obstreperous nature.
“However,
I found him
The most quietly polite
And retiring
Of young
Gentlemen”