All Names Have Been Changed (2 page)

We each of us in our own way attempted to explain to Glynn as best we were able how much his work meant to us. We stuttered and blurted before him, blushed and shifted our weight. Antonia was too curt and said it came out patronisingly, as if she were addressing the hired help. ‘Wonderful work,’ she informed him, followed by a hearty, ‘Well done,’ hearing in her voice an echo of the belligerent insincerity of Glynn’s earlier ‘Good for you!’ Antonia was cursed with an unfortunate manner, but couldn’t seem to help herself. Aisling was too vague: (‘I get it. No, really: I
get
it.’) Guinevere, by the time she reached the top of the queue, was trembling from head to toe. She didn’t utter a syllable, could barely manage eye contact, and instead spilled warm smiles
all over the great writer’s hands. Faye said she just closed her eyes.

Despite our tongue-tied stage fright, we came away discerning from whatever way Glynn had responded, whatever glance he had thrown in our direction – this communication must not have been forged through words, seeing as none of us could remember him saying any – each of us came away from the signing believing that he loved us. He may not have said as much, but we felt his love as strongly as we hoped he felt ours. It wasn’t a trick, it wasn’t a delusion, it wasn’t a testament to what a professional he was. His love was perceptible in a capacity that is impossible to define, being expressed not through word or sign, but directed at the soul. Our soul. Glynn hated that word.

We spilled out into the filthy city afterwards, the five of us, and slipped back unnoticed into the driving rain, not to meet for another four years. I was aware as I crossed onto South Anne Street of a foolish reluctance to glance back at the Academy lest it already be magicked away. I longed to be back there the moment I left, amongst the warmth, the shuffling bodies, the lowered voices, the comforting fug. Once, as a small boy, I had hidden in the cloakroom when the school bell rang and spent a happy morning amongst duffel coats and the contents of classmates’ pockets while the school day went on as normal without me. All my life I have been trying to return there.

‘Do you think he really loved us?’ Antonia once asked me, apropos of nothing. She wasn’t even drunk. We’d been crossing Front Square when she detained me with a gloved hand and made me turn to face her. It was unusual
for Antonia and me to be alone together. This was not a permutation into which the group naturally fell.

Night was almost upon us. The air was growing glutinous, mottled as the cobbles underfoot. The darkness exaggerated Antonia’s already dramatic features. She was all mouth and eyes staring urgently up at me, as if my answer mattered to her; Antonia, who generally barely registered my presence. I’d either stopped hating her by then, or had not yet started. She’d voiced the question quietly, careful that no one should overhear, choosing me and not one of the others presumably on the reasoning that I was the sole member of the group who would not lie to her out of common decency, possessing, in her opinion, no shred of it. Whatever way she’d inflected the question made me unexpectedly want to hold her, hold the ball of nervy sinews and resentful bones that was her.

‘I do,’ I affirmed as vigorously as I could, conscious of how difficult it must have been for a woman like Antonia to have used as intimate a term as ‘love’, in light of its spectacular failure in her life. I wanted her to know that she was in safe company now, that the restrictions she had experienced in her relationships hitherto no longer applied with us. ‘I do, Antonia, I firmly believe he loved us. There is not a shadow of doubt in my mind.’

She accepted this information with a nod of agreement – Glynn’s love had felt real to her too – and then she threw me an imploring, almost panicked, glance, which exposed the fragility I hadn’t discerned in her until then.

‘Well, goodbye then, Declan,’ she said, knotting the belt on her long black coat, having learned the invaluable lesson that every mother should teach her daughter,
apparently: that a decent winter coat is a good all-round defence against whatever life might throw at you. That, and a good haircut. We hovered by Front Arch a second longer, wondering how to part. This delay decided matters. Antonia abruptly set off alone on her patent stilettos, as if we hadn’t previously been travelling in the same direction. The incident was never mentioned again, but I was glad of the exchange. I don’t think I ever really hated Antonia, when it comes down to it. It was just a way of channelling insurmountable emotions.

I met a woman once who claimed she’d known Glynn as a child, and I can find no reason to doubt her account of him. I had been sitting on my own in the lounge area of a public house in Leeds one Sunday afternoon in the December of 1984 reading Glynn’s first novel,
Prussian Blue
, a second time (just twenty-four years of age when he published it – what hope was there for the rest of us?) when the woman seated next to me on the wall-to-wall banquette leaned across to my table. She wore a gold T-bar rope chain over her royal-blue polo-neck jumper, and a black mohair cardigan over that again, stray fibres of which she picked off her lip from time to time like strands of loose tobacco. She had been observing me for some minutes.

‘I was in national school with your man,’ she finally remarked, nodding at my paperback. Her accent was rural Irish, right enough. ‘A holy terror,’ she added with satisfaction, pursing her lips in a manner that said,
Go on, ask me more
. She folded her arms and gave herself a brisk squeeze of pleasure at the prospect of throwing in her tuppence worth. We are a nation that likes nothing better than a good story, preferably featuring one of our own, ideally the parish black sheep, and few could hold a candle to Glynn in that field. I frowned at his author
photograph on the back of
Prussian
Blue
to confirm we were discussing the same individual. ‘That’s the boyo,’ said the woman, ‘the very man,’ and indeed she looked the correct vintage to have been in Glynn’s class: mid-fifties, thereabouts.

‘In Wicklow, was this?’ I asked her.

‘Arklow,’ she asserted.

‘I see.’ So she knew what she was talking about. I was all ears after that.

Glynn’s childhood remains what you might call a grey area. It is difficult to even conceive of him as a boy, if the truth be told. Just one short story in his body of work is told from the point of view of a child. The powerful evocations of childhood which characterise the novels are refracted through the narrative agency of a grown man casting his mind back (for yes, they are all male, Glynn’s protagonists – all male, all to blame, all contrite to the point of belligerence). Little is recorded of Glynn’s early years save for a few bald facts such as which schools he attended, and when. Dr M. J. Hanratty’s otherwise exhaustively researched biography,
Glynn: An Irish Paradox
(Oxford University Press, 1982), glosses over the topic in a matter of paragraphs. Glynn himself joked in an interview with the London
Times
that he sprang forth fully grown on the 18th of April 1952, at the age of twenty-one. This was the date his first piece of writing was published, a short story in the
Irish
Press
. ‘
Homo
poeticus
was born,’ he was quoted as saying, borrowing the phrase from Nabokov without accrediting him. ‘Life before writing was hardly a life for me at all,’ he elaborated when queried by the interviewer why he so casually discounted his childhood.

Here follows a little cited fact: for a period of eighteen
months commencing in 1948, Glynn was a seminarian. After completing his secondary-school education he entered St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, to study to be a priest. Has enough been made of this biographical detail, I wonder? Glynn doesn’t exactly conceal this information so much as not exactly publicise it either. Should photographs of him in his cassock exist I have so far failed to come across them, notwithstanding my great curiosity and renowned attention to detail.

Mention is always made in the Note on the Author printed on Glynn’s dust jackets of the four years he spent reading Classics in Trinity – something of a novelty for Catholics at the time – but never a whisper of his spell in Maynooth. He was asked about it on the night of his public reading in the Royal Irish Academy, which was the first I’d heard of him harbouring religious inclinations. It made sense, though, when you thought about it. He had an uncommon capacity for awe. ‘It’s no secret,’ Glynn responded, as if the questioner had suggested it was. He did not elucidate on the subject beyond this statement.

Brigid – for that was her name, the Arklow woman in the shedding mohair cardigan that Sunday afternoon in the pub in Leeds – Brigid wasn’t in the least bit surprised when her mother told her that young Glynn was studying to enter the priesthood. And she wasn’t in the least bit surprised either, she was quick to add, when her mother told her the following year that young Glynn was only after spoiling his vocation. ‘I’d put nothing past Patsy!’ said Brigid with glee, ‘and look it, wasn’t I right?’ I laughed. Glynn with a Christian name? Ludicrous. Brigid laughed too, for different reasons, I assume. She flicked through the pages of my paperback
edition of
Prussian
Blue
and snorted in begrudging admiration before passing the book back. ‘A gas man for the sermons still, I see.’

As a young fella of no more than seven or eight years, Patsy refused, Brigid informed me, to play Mammies and Daddies or Doctors and Nurses with all the other little boys and girls on his road, instead devising his own game, which he called Mass. Mass was conducted in Patsy’s back garden. He was always the priest, and the other children were always his flock. ‘Father,’ they had to call him. ‘Yes my child,’ he would reply. None of them ever questioned this arrangement, no one dared to bags the top job from him. Glynn organised his congregation into rows and made them sit, and sometimes kneel, to listen to his sermons in dutiful silence. Brigid corrected herself: there was nothing dutiful about their silence; the children were spellbound.
Gobsmacked
was the word she used. ‘The things he came out with!’ she cried. ‘And the little size of him!’ Everything she uttered had an exclamation mark attached, now that she’d hit her stride. I bought her another sherry.

Glynn scared the living bejaysus out of his playmates, issuing arcane threats of damnation that he surely could not spell; Brigid shuddered in lurid recollection, visibly enjoying her day out. Other times, the children were seduced by his lyrical descriptions of Paradise, or regaled with knuckle-whitening stories about bible characters which were entirely fabricated. The stories were fabricated, that is, not the characters. Glynn appropriated names from the Bible – Moses, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Saul – and threw in some period detail to lend the thing an air of authenticity; sandals, locusts, olive trees and whatnot.

The children grew confused as to what was actually in the Bible and what most certainly wasn’t, Glynn’s stories being so much more memorable than the real thing, and that, I have come to believe, is the measure of a good novel. ‘They stayed with you,’ Brigid observed, ‘do you know what I mean? The trouble he got us into with Sister Mercedes!’ Sister Mercedes had to set the kids straight with a cane.

Once a week, young Glynn heard confession. This was a grave, terror-inducing business conducted in the pitch darkness of the coal shed. The children kneeled beside the nettle patch, Brigid related, and prayed to the garden wall until the shed door creaked open an inch or two and Glynn’s finger beckoned through the chink. The little ones used to cry. Why they actually waited there like frightened lambs and didn’t run off to play normal games with normal children, Brigid would never know. All this, Glynn would argue, is merely hearsay.

This desire to sermonise was misinterpreted by the religious orders as evidence of a vocation, and a seventeen-year-old Glynn found himself packed off to Maynooth with another hundred or so boys similar to him, and probably worse than him, knowing the state of the country then, forties Ireland, mother of God, was there no end to it? The forties dragged on until the seventies. This was hardly the plan, not by a long shot, not to get banged up with them yokes, up there chewing the altar rails. Where were the women, for a start? After an interlude of spiritual reflection, Glynn, now nineteen, discovered that his calling wasn’t in fact to serve the Lord after all, but rather to find a flock. And there were easier ways of coming by an audience, what with his talent. I am, it should be said, surmising.

Brigid did not grasp the significance of her anecdote: that Glynn had managed by the tender age of eight to captivate his first audience. His mesmerising faculty with language was evident from the outset, his strange power with words was apparent even then. The audacity of coupling biblical names with historical props to fashion a narrative so authentic that the local kids accepted it as, well, Gospel – you had to hand it to the little chancer, you had to take off your hat. The man was born to hold a pen in his hand.

Brigid stubbornly refused to see the matter in those terms. She had formulated strong opinions of her own regarding Patsy Glynn’s coal-shed evangelising and seemed crestfallen, even a little bitter, when I didn’t endorse them, when I declined to add my voice to her round condemnation, on the contrary finding it increasingly difficult to contain my mounting excitement. It marked the end of our association.

The timing of my chat with Brigid turned out to be auspicious. Just one of those things. A sign, if you like. A mere matter of weeks later, and a full three years after the five of us had individually, unbeknownst to each other, scattered throughout the soggy audience of approximately two hundred, attended Glynn’s Royal Irish Academy reading, I found myself entirely by chance face to face with the man himself. I had never seen him in daylight before. What a pallor he had on him.

It was the Christmas of 1984, and I was home in Ireland for the holidays. I’d just that morning come up on the bus from Mayo to visit friends in Dublin when he joined me at the pedestrian lights on the Ha’penny Bridge, also waiting to cross. There we suddenly were, standing side by side on the banks of the Liffey one brisk
breezy afternoon in late December, regarding each other none too warmly. Seagulls with wingspans as broad as eagles wheeled and screamed above the great writer’s head, part of the aura he carried everywhere, the raucous extension of his mind into the sky. Glynn protested a lifelong interest in the avian world, coastal species in particular: gulls of all types, terns, gannets, cormorants, guillemots – they feature prominently in his work.

Though I knew the contours of his face almost as well as I knew my own, I still did a double take to make sure it was really Glynn. He looked somehow contrived; not Glynn, but a man dressed up as him. Surely the real Glynn should not have to try so hard to resemble himself, and still not fully succeed? He was shivering despite it being an unseasonably pleasant afternoon, sunny enough to force us both to squint, or, in his case, scowl. In retrospect, it seems likely he was enduring one of his health scares at the time. Mortality; another of Glynn’s great topics.

His navy coat was fastened to the throat, the collar turned up around his ears. It looked as naked as a shirt buttoned to the neck without a tie. No one had ever accused Glynn of possessing style. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his cheeks, when he coughed wetly without covering his mouth, puffed out the mauve grey of the homeless. About his person, the various appurtenances with which we were to become so familiar: the umbrella, the high grade hat and, in case there was any doubt as to his occupation, the old chestnut-brown leather satchel from his student days. Glynn had been a Foundation Scholar at Trinity in the early 1950s, an honour he shared with Wilde and Beckett.

A fair to middling crowd of bargain hunters had
gathered at the lights, not one of whom had spotted the prodigy walking amongst us.
Hibernia
had been published three years previously to international acclaim. Glynn must have read the jumble of confusion and zeal on my face, because he regarded me with a harried eye, but it was also a speculative one. This was typical of the man, I would come to learn. Jaded by the attention, but nonetheless courting it. He seemed perpetually on the brink of issuing an observation of literary import, of producing poetic utterance. That’s how it felt to be standing next to him – braced for epiphanic articulation to burst into the world, your hands cupped in readiness to catch it.

Glynn sighed impatiently and tapped his umbrella against his leg, urging it to giddy up and get him the hell out of there. He had a point: the lights were taking for ever to change. The country should have shown him more respect. The circumstances, it occurred to me then, were unrepeatable. I could not, even on paper, have devised a scenario more accommodating to our first conversation. It was the casual nature of the encounter that was most striking. Two men of the world briefly detained by a set of pedestrian lights. One man, the younger, leans in to extol the work of the elder, and the elder is pleased to hear that his work remains relevant to the next generation. These are his people, after all. This is his country, is it not? Glynn put himself on the line with
The
Ashtray
Chronicle
, exposed the darkest thoughts, the most pitiful weaknesses, the apparently boundlessly abject nature of man. It wasn’t much to ask of me to issue a sentence or two of gratitude in return for such uncompromising honesty. There was another fierce outbreak of shrieking amongst the gulls, their hysteria
louder than the thundering traffic. Glynn swivelled his bloodshot eyes upward, swaying on his feet, and I winced at the stale reek of last night’s stout.

A lorry hurtled up the quays at a reckless speed, and the crowd back-stepped in alarm, jostling the two of us together. I turned to Glynn and cleared my throat to speak. His speculative appraisal of me hardened into an admonitory glare. How was I supposed to know that the anonymous poison-pen letters had recently put in their first appearance? Sometimes they were delivered through the postal system, but more often than not by hand, dropping through his letterbox at all hours of the day and night. One had even materialised in his coat pocket after a particularly punishing night out on the tiles.

Despite putting his back into it, deploying the formidable powers of observation at his disposal, Glynn never managed to catch the perpetrator in the act. Whoever penned the things was unnervingly conversant with his movements, appearing to know before even Glynn knew where he would be found. It was with great assiduity that they had studied their subject, displaying an eye for detail and a flair for dramatic timing rivalling that of the master himself. How intimate the two must have become, in a perverse way, brooding over each other like lovers all those long hours. Glynn had come to regard every dog and divil as their potential author, a man under siege from an assailant he couldn’t see. His tormentor could have been standing right next to him in the crowd at that very moment, for all he knew. Perhaps that explains why he shuddered.