Maeve Binchy (13 page)

I
n 1968, in the aftermath of Maureen’s death, Maeve described herself as ‘restless’. She was mourning her mother and with her sister Joan engaged to be married, Renie walking out with the man she would marry, and her brother married to Alice O’Connor, Maeve felt doomed to a life alone at Eastmount with her father.

William was still only in his fifties, active, working in Dublin, and Maeve couldn’t see the situation changing for twenty or thirty years. ‘She was staring down the barrel of spinsterhood,’ as Donal Lynch put it succinctly.

She was also uncertain about remaining a teacher. Twelve months earlier she had written an article for the
Irish Times
entitled
‘I Just Love Being a Teacher’, but in 1968 Miss Meredith’s had rejected the opportunity open to all schools in Eire to join the free or state school system, and this deeply upset Maeve on account of her views about social discrimination in education.

Another problem presented itself. She had been an
atheist
for five years. Travel and adventure had opened her eyes
to the world, but hadn’t replenished the spiritual vacuum left by her loss of faith. She was still and would always remain a God-seeker in Lessing’s sense. ‘Even when Catholics don’t believe,’ says Elizabeth White in
Light a Penny Candle
, ‘they have something inside them that makes them think they do.’ Maeve didn’t believe in God, but deep down she remained sensitive to His absence.

She had returned to the kibbutz in 1964 and ’65, not to chase her false lover, rather because of the new sense of purpose she had glimpsed there in ’63.

She had been disappointed. She did not root down into the utopian commune culture of the kibbutz, because ultimately it was a political entity and real politicos were a different sort of animal to her. If anything, their aggressive stance threatened the very ideals of the commune they promoted.

Keeping her promise to William not to tell her mother that she had lost her faith had meant that she never spoke to Maureen about the hollow which, for all the adventure, freedom and wild sensation in her life, was eating at her inside.

When Doris Lessing became disenchanted with utopian communism she found what she was looking for in Sufism, believed by many to be ‘the secret teaching within all religions’,
46
while unaligned to the politics of any particular one of them.

Maeve acknowledged that ‘many people of my age were affected by the dazzling novels of people such as Doris Lessing’, but though she was sympathetic to Lessing’s desire to look for meaning in the immaterial, Lessing would not provide the path that would appeal to Maeve.

That would be Maureen’s legacy.

It happened on a trip that summer to Lisdoonvarna, a small town on the road from Ennistymon to Ballyvaghan in County Clare, far to the west of Ireland in one of its most beautiful, unspoiled areas.

It is possible that the trip had been planned in memory of Maureen, even perhaps originally to trace Maeve’s maternal family tree, and was undertaken in the light of an ever
increasing
realisation of how important an influence her mother had been and how much Maeve was missing her.

As it happened, Lisdoonvarna was that year the host to the summer school of a festival known as Cumann Merriman, which had started up the year before and has been held at some town or other in the district of Thomond every year since.

Thomond includes parts of counties Tipperary (the county of Maureen’s birth) and Limerick, and the whole of County Clare, a quite breathtaking area full of the remnants of Irish civilisation from three or four millennia ago – more than ninety megalithic tombs (dating to the fourth millennium BC), portal dolmens, a Celtic high cross in the village of Kilfenora and a number of ring forts.

The landscape is stunningly beautiful, especially the Atlantic seaboard and the Burren, from the Irish ‘Boireann’,
meaning
‘great rock’. It is one of the largest limestone terrains in Europe, a rich patchwork of criss-cross ‘grikes’ or cracks, full of Mediterranean and alpine plants in the summer and punctuated by secret underground streams and gorges. Around ninety-six square miles, the area is bounded by the Atlantic to the west,
Galway Bay to the north, and roughly demarcated by the villages of Ballyvaghan, Kinvara, Tubber, Corofin, Kilfenora and Lisdoonvarna, where there are still people who speak
an Ghailge
(Gaelic), the ancient language of Ireland.

Cumann Merriman plugged Maeve into the true spirit of Ireland. Here in County Clare the beauty, the language, the people, the archaeology strewn over the surface of the land, and the momentum of the festival itself, took Maeve by surprise.

At Lisdoonvarna Maeve discovered that tradition in Ireland goes right down into word and gesture, ritual and dance,
mythology
, song, poetry and music, art and architecture, custom and convention, even law. For there is a sixteenth-century School of Brehon Law here, the form of law originally built up from the customs, traditions and practices of the Irish people within the ancient pre-Christian kingdoms.

Cumann Merriman offered poetry readings, lectures,
seminars
, dance classes and ‘conversations way into the night with poets, politicians, professors and polka dancers’. Most of all she loved how connected the regular festival-goers were, ‘a great roaming band of people old and young’, the friendliness of the
failtiú
(the welcome), and the unaffected fun of the craic – ‘they urged us to pace ourselves … This, I think, had to do with not staying up until six o’clock in the morning singing, which was a danger.’ In particular she loved how they all ‘lapsed gently from English into Irish’ and back again, slipping easily between their modern conscious selves and the collective unconscious of their ancient past, when Gaelic was the spoken word.

Here Maeve connected with the collective unconscious of her people, experiencing it in the resonances between them, expressed in a great sense of belonging, sensing this native warmth as the beauty that invests the hills and valleys of rural Ireland with a spirit all of its own.

She returned to the festival every year for forty years or more – as if for refreshment to a religious retreat (though that would have been a good deal more abstemious). But she remembered this first occasion especially. ‘It was a great charge to my spirit to come here,’ she said.

The visit confirmed who she was and gave her a kind of
spiritual
ballast to the new self-belief. In a literary sense it proved to be crucial too, for the festival, whose patron is the Nobel
Prizewinning
poet Seamus Heaney, celebrates the eighteenth-century poet Brian Merriman, a legend in Ireland on account of his
thousand
-line poem ‘Cúirt an Mheán Oíche’ (‘The Midnight Court’).

‘The Midnight Court’ belongs to the ancient ‘Aisling’ poetic convention. ‘Aisling’ refers to what is in modern psychological terms the poet’s ‘anima’, the spirit- or dream-girl who, like the Irish Muse-Goddess Bridget in myth, may appear to him as maiden, nymph or crone.

However she appears, Aisling is always female. She personifies the all-seeing intuitive feminine side of the poet’s thinking, capable of cutting through the rational restraints of his
day-to
-day conscious thinking and engaging directly with the collective unconscious (the psychological drives that make his people tick). Aisling is, in short, the poet’s inspiration or muse.
No wonder Maeve chose the name for her first heroine, Aisling O’Connor, who embodies the spirit of Ireland and who took Maeve into the hearts of millions.

‘The Midnight Court’ is comedic and Rabelaisian, embracing the reputation that the area has for matchmaking. For hundreds of years, in September, with the harvest safely in, bachelor farmers have flocked to Lisdoonvarna in search of wives – and still do. The current ‘matchmaker’ is a man with the
appropriate
name of Willie Daly. Although matchmaking sounds like merely a dating service, it has great symbolic significance, a first amorous step to fruitfulness and spiritual renewal for the year that will follow.

On account of its Rabelaisian style, Merriman’s ‘The Midnight Court’ has been described as a parody of the Aisling tradition – misguidedly, for it is in every sense within the tradition. It celebrates the otherworldly feminine mystique of Ireland, and is set in a pre-Christian, matriarchal society ruled by the Aoibhea, Queen of the Fairies, who dispenses Ireland’s ancient Brehon Law. So Merriman leads us to traditional pre-Christian, indeed to pre-Achaean (i.e. before 1900 BC), matriarchal Ireland, the remnants of which litter the local landscape in Thomond – the megalithic tombs, for example, which festival-goers can examine at their leisure every day.

Year after year Maeve drew from the deep well of inspiration at Cumann Merriman, and in the Aoibhea found a powerful matriarchal figure with whom to identify. The poem was of course written in Gaelic, though fortunately, as she observed,
there is ‘a rake of translations’, the only problem being that ‘everyone [at the Festival] recommended a different one’.

She saw her own literary career as starting here, and wrote a short story about her first experience of it, called ‘A Week in Summer’, which she gave to the festival in 2005, the
bicentenary
of Brian Merriman’s death. The story is a delight and tells precisely how Cumann Merriman inspired her. A troubled couple, Kathleen Merman and her husband Brian, set off to trace Kathleen’s forebears in Limerick, but are persuaded by a travel agent to choose Lisdoonvarna in neighbouring County Clare because, being a spa town, it will be better for Brian, a failed teacher who writes poetry in the attic and is a deep depressive.

As Maeve did, the Mermans arrive in the third week of August. On awakening after an afternoon nap in their hotel room they find themselves in the middle of the festival and are swept along in the warm current of good feeling. Everyone is very friendly and full of advice. They are made aware of every aspect of the place, including the Merriman poem, ‘The Midnight Court’, which becomes of particular interest to Brian.

Out of the window goes Kathleen’s original plan to shuffle documents in search of her roots. And of course there is no need, for like Maeve she finds her roots in the warm compost of her mother’s Ireland, singing and talking and reading and dancing her way back into the land of her birth, in Maeve’s case a year after her mother’s death, which is why when Kathleen finally coaxes Brian onto the dance floor, everyone in the hall is singing the words:

With the lightest of touches Maeve lifts Brian’s spirits (as hers were lifted) and amidst the beauty of Fanore, ‘a great place for the soul’, a little village on the west coast of Clare beyond which you can look out over the Atlantic and see dolphins play, she accords him a revelation as mythical and inspiring as the one that she experienced on her first trip to Cumann Merriman in 1968.

At Fanore she delivers Brian’s sweet insane notion that he and Kathleen are none other than the reincarnation of Brian Merriman and the poet’s wife Kathleen Collins. They share their names almost – he is Brian Merman and Kathleen’s maiden name is indeed Collins. He has followed the same career as the great poet, and he lists endless other similarities. It is mad, it is insane. Kathleen’s heart sinks; she had thought that his depression was lifting. ‘“How EXACTLY a reincarnation?”’ she asks ‘with a deathbed smile’, hoping she doesn’t sound ‘too like Nurse Ratchett in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
’.

Maeve delivers Brian’s joyous news in the context of her own hard-won freedom from the lobotomised society of Ken Kesey’s classic beat generation book, and to Kathleen’s joy her husband has returned to her spiritually refreshed, moving forward with his life, whatever Nurse Ratchett’s medical diagnosis might have been.

The festival gives Brian Merman the strength to come out and share his poetry with other people. ‘It had been the sign he
needed, something to prove to him that he wasn’t worthless…’ It was the sign Maeve had needed, too. ‘Suddenly everything in their lives fitted into place and they felt confident and cheerful.’

From this moment it seemed that fate took a hand in Maeve’s life, but it was catalysed by a decision
she
took. When she got home at the end of August 1968, she decided it was time to change her job.

It had been five years since her first newspaper article was published and although she couldn’t have lived on the money she was making, there was momentum in her writing. She decided to give up her safe, permanent and pensionable job as a teacher and become a freelance journalist, full time.

Her father was quite sanguine about it. He pointed out the risks, but was probably aware that Maeve would go ahead whatever he said. He concluded that if Maureen were alive she would have advised her to do it, and gave her his blessing.

The risk, in fact, was minimal. She could at any time go back to teaching. Psychologically it was a good move because the decision made a virtue of living at home with her father – money would be short and the arrangement allowed her to live
somewhere
that cost nothing. In the event, her father even offered to subsidise her a little in exchange for some light housework, which Maeve described as ‘notional’.

Then out of the blue she received a telephone call from the
Irish Times
asking her to come in and see them. She feared there must be some awful inaccuracy or legal problem with something she’d written. Her father, a lawyer, advised her as he was wont to do – ‘Admit nothing. Whatever they say, admit nothing!’ She
arrived at the office full of nerves but was told that there was going to be a vacancy for a Women’s Editor. Was she interested?

Maeve claimed that the offer was a huge surprise. She was a 29-year-old teacher without a day’s experience of working in a newspaper office. But after Merriman it seemed heaven sent. Call it fate – or perhaps a savvy move by News and Deputy Editor Donal Foley, the man who wanted her and later became immortalised in the rather different persona of Jack Foley, Benny’s boyfriend in
Circle of Friends
. ‘Savvy’ because Maeve’s belief that ‘the secret of the universe is that we do have to take control of our own lives’ was never more relevant than in the late 1960s. Women who all their lives had seen success as making a successful marriage – ceding control, in fact, and getting looked after by a man – were about to get a wake-up call.