Trespassers (10 page)

Gogarty was a surgeon as well as a poet, and one of Eileen’s less cheerful memories was of his chatting away while taking out her tonsils without an anaesthetic. He showed them to her at once
and was about to take them to the next room to show them to Seán, when she managed to rally and dissuade him, since Seán might have fainted. Doctors who examined her throat later told her that the poet had done a perfect job. And he charged her nothing.

As her stories were often about acquaintances, libel actions were a risk. Publishers, in the Thirties and Forties, were almost always English and so subject to the harsh English libel laws. Yet Dubliners continued to sue and to risk being sued, and it is hard not to think that this activity was providing them with some of the buzz and challenge that conspiracy had done for earlier generations. It was sometimes seen too as a handy source of cash. Yet not all libel victims could or did sue. Take the case of Gogarty himself, recognisably the original of Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s
Ulysses
, but, although meanly lampooned by Joyce, who had sponged on him and then suggested the reverse in his novel, he did not sue. Perhaps, as
Ulysses
had been published in Paris, he couldn’t. Instead, in 1937 he was himself sued by an uncle of Samuel Beckett’s, who claimed that his grandfather had been described in Gogarty’s semi-fictional memoir as a usurer and a man partial to little girls. Gogarty had to pay
£
900 plus costs, which doubled his loss. Passing on the pain, like a character in
La Ronde
, he then sued the penniless poet Patrick Kavanagh who, in describing a call he had paid on him, had written in
his
memoir,
The Green Fool
, ‘I mistook Gogarty’s … maid for his wife or his mistress.’ Gogarty’s objection to this seems to have been that the text brought the words ‘wife’ and ‘mistress’ indecently close. Since the unfortunate Kavanagh had only recently come from his stony, Monaghan farm, his innocence seems blatant, especially as not only Joyce but also Gogarty’s own poems had portrayed Gogarty himself as a buck. One of those included in Yeats’s
Oxford Book of Modern Verse
which had come out in 1936 goes as follows:

Though the poem defamed its author’s domestic arrangements more effectively than poor Kavanagh did, Gogarty got
£
100 in damages; the book was withdrawn, and Kavanagh, though he had been a frequent visitor to our house, must have decided that, as Dubliners were twisters, he would be one too and sue Seán for publishing a poem of his in
The Bell
without permission. Seán claimed that they had agreed viva voce that he could publish, but had no written proof. This must have led to speculation in the pubs, for, on running into Kavanagh in one of them, Michael Scott, the leading Irish architect of the day, asked him why he was being so litigious. The poet, in his splendidly gravelly and wistful voice, said, ‘I might make a few pounds.’ Scott immediately offered to supply these from his own pocket if Kavanagh dropped his action. Kavanagh took the money but went back on his word, so Scott said
he’d
sue
him
– and, as often happened in Dublin,
the thing fizzled out. Libel threats, however, continued to amuse some and worry others, and I can still summon the perplexity I felt when, at breakfast one morning, Eileen laughed in relief on finding a sonnet in the
Irish Times
by a writer, called Arland Ussher, which called Seán a yahoo.

‘Thank God!’ she exclaimed. ‘Now that Ussher’s vented his rage he won’t sue over the hatchet-job of a review Seán published of his book.’

Alerted to the volatility of Dublin’s hungry jungle, Seán now arranged for the solicitor, Christopher Gore-Grimes, to vet for libel everything he was thinking of publishing. ‘Christo’, a yachtsman and a sportsman whose solicitors’ firm was well established, may have enjoyed the risk of finding himself maligned – libelled even – by writers with whom this activity brought him into contact. Honor Tracy, who was to arrive in Dublin in 1946, wrote satirical novels, one of which described a character based on him as having ‘bog water coming up through his Trinity accent’. Christo didn’t mind. And Honor, a woman of nerve, went on to provoke a Kerry parish priest who promptly sued the
Sunday Times
, where she had reported on the extravagance of his living arrangements and the cost of his new bathroom. The paper apologised on her behalf, whereupon she sued its proprietor and became the only person I ever knew or heard of who simultaneously took on the Irish Church, the English libel laws and Kemsley newspapers and won. In those years of few jobs and less industry, libel actions were a lively form of gambling. My admiration for her was infinite. According to Google, she was awarded damages of
£
5,000. Think what that would have bought in 1954.

But before then a lot of Liffey water would flow under the bridges.

Starting in 1940,
The Bell
was produced in what we called ‘the hut’, a small, pretty building at the end of our garden, covered by green shingles and containing a desk, books, a divan and a wide window. This looked out past several downward-sloping fields belonging to Captain Disney towards a pond where a solitary heron spent most of its time standing motionless on one leg. On the near side of the hut was a verandah, to which Eileen and I were sometimes allowed to bring a picnic. Usually, however, this territory was taboo, reserved for
The Bell
’s staff members, chief of whom was Harry Craig, who could put his hand to anything. He edited, subedited, wrote articles signed, according to need, with either his own name or a pseudonym, and queued for our bus tickets when we were taking a trip to Cork or, as we sometimes did, to Kilkenny. Over the years Harry helped Seán to make several garden features including a swing, a sandpit, a rose walk and a wooden seat the size of a cartwheel which encircled an old tree. He was also our star reader when we read each other poetry, as people in those years used to do. With a lilting Limerick accent and a penchant for love verse, he was a student at Trinity College, a parson’s son, and a known heart-breaker, for news of whom female voices would beg with shy insistence on the phone. I think my mistrust of charm, which would be re-activated years later when I grew up and began spending time in Italy, must have first started when dealing with Harry’s girls who breathed hot, furtive hope into my ear while pleading to have their calls switched to the hut.

This – Seán’s memoirs remind me – had not, at first, been on the phone at all. He had thought of it as a writer’s retreat, and, at the
beginning, if someone rang who urgently needed to reach him, he had had to be summoned to the house by one of us walking out along Killiney Hill Road ringing a large cowbell which he had bought on a visit to Kentucky.

Soon, though, a phone extension was connecting hut and house, where Eileen and I briskly interviewed callers and weeded out
time-wasters
. Our life had grown busy and convivial, for we often had guests at lunch and tea, and regularly for open-house on Sunday nights. As a result, I became expert at making sandwiches and large salads of chopped beetroot mixed with US-donated corned beef which were our mainstay whenever we had to provide a meal in a hurry. Money was short, so, even on the Sunday evenings, no drink was offered until the end of the war, when Seán started keeping a barrel of Guinness in the back yard. Others, though, were hungrier than we, and men like Kavanagh were prepared to walk the ten miles from the city centre to Killiney just to drink tea and eat sandwiches, some of which they put in their pockets to sustain them on the walk back. Tea was scarce. The ration, half an ounce per person per week, was smaller than in England, but people who were hard up sold their coupons, so the rest managed. Unfair? Yes, it was. But large, needy families were probably better off than before, since now they had something to sell. Meanwhile fuel was next to non-existent, so we burned damp turf, whose smoke left a combustible deposit in the chimneys which sometimes caught fire and, in our case, left a crack in the living-room chimney breast which had to be covered by a decorative cloth.

In 1939 when I got my first bike, guests who arrived too early risked being asked to teach me to ride it. Harry Craig and a handsome Russian called Alexander Lieven were my favourite instructors, and the joy of their presence led me to drag out the learning process. Kavanagh didn’t volunteer but wrote jingles in my poetry notebook instead. Other visitors whose comings and goings I can’t date were Brian Inglis, Brendan Behan (definitely
post-war), Valentine Iremonger, Conor Cruise O’Brien and his first wife, Christine, Norah McGuinness, Betty Rivers, David Marcus, Arthur Power and Geoffrey Taylor (formerly Phibbs) who took over as poetry editor of
The Bell
from Frank O’Connor, whose colleague he had been in Wicklow Library. Both used pseudonyms, Frank because when he was a librarian he didn’t want anything lewd he might write – Irish authorities often found life lewd – being traced to him. Taylor meanwhile had already shed
his
name when he got caught up in a small but lively scandal. This had involved Robert Graves and Laura Riding and, though it ended with her jumping out of a fourth-floor window and breaking – or not breaking? – her back, had started in Wicklow when the painter, Norah McGuinness, who was then Mrs Phibbs, went off with David Garnett, and Geoffrey took up with the American poet, Laura Riding, who was at the time living with Graves. The two shared her, and the story has more versions than a folktale.

The next thing was that Frank ran off – these were the words always used of such events – with the wife of the actor, Robert Speight. One thinks of the rape of the Sabines, with Mrs Speight looking beautifully lewd as the unathletic Frank tries to hold her aloft.

But perhaps he borrowed a pony and trap? Cars were scarce. Indeed, I doubt if any of our Sunday guests had one, though John Betjeman, who was press attaché at the British Embassy and, unknown to us, also worked for the British Ministry of Information, may have done so, and so must Sir John Maffey, the British representative, who came at least once. Betjeman’s letters, however, complain about having to take buses, so perhaps he didn’t run a car for long. He used to send Seán letters signed in cod Irish as Seán Ó Betjemán and once invited our whole family to lunch at his country house. Or so I remember it. Only now, reading his daughter’s edition of his letters, do I see what a drag this may have been.

‘I have to see pro-Germans,’ one letter complains to an English friend. ‘Pro-Italians, pro-British and, most of all, anti-British people … I have to go about saying “Britain will win in the end” and I have to be charming to everyone and I am getting eaten up with hate of my fellow beings as a result. The strain is far greater than living in London under the blitz.’

Oh dear. He
was
charming and, when I met him again with Seán in the Seventies, he still was. I hope that on those later occasions he was under less strain.

It is clear from his published letters that Seán, Frank and Kavanagh were in the pro-British category and so in no need of conversion. Despite – or because of – that, he got them occasional jobs on the BBC, each of which involved a trip to London and a chance for a breather away from what Seán called ‘the dull smother’ of wartime Ireland. He seems also to have helped organise the 1942 Irish number of Cyril Connolly’s
Horizon
, which published work by all three, most memorably Kavanagh’s poem
The Great Hunger,
then promptly seized by the Irish police on the usual grounds of obscenity.

Inevitably, there was the odd row on our open-house Sunday evenings. After all, if you declare yours an open house, you can’t then restrict your guest list to people who get along with each other. And in the Forties there were plenty of reasons for Dubliners not to do that, especially if one of them had reviewed – or failed to review – books by others, or was on the Left or the Right, or despised our neutrality or had killed someone’s father in 1922 or 1923. But I, whose role was to hand around sandwiches and refill cups with tea, either never knew or have now forgotten why people got upset.

Once, though, our family got caught up in a row which I
remember with unpleasant clarity. This did not happen on home ground. We were playing away.

In 1946 Seán, Eileen, my brother Stevie and I paid our last summer visit to our elected Eden, Gougane Barra, which, on that occasion, turned out to be more like the biblical one than expected. It bristled with sanctimony and a hiss of suspicions which, like the snake, crushed in old paintings by the Virgin’s foot, were of a frankly sexual nature. So there was a fall from grace ending with our being, if not quite cast out, pointedly ostracised. It happened as follows.

Seán had arranged to rent an old-style, though well-appointed, horse-drawn caravan in Cork City and drive it slowly west to Gougane, pausing en route to shop, cook, eat, sleep, drop into pubs and look up old friends. This was a romantic idea and also a source of cash, since he sold accounts of the journey to one of the Irish Sunday newspapers which serialised them as we proceeded west, allowing us to buy copies from rural newsagents along the way, read about our doings almost as soon as they happened and admire their snapshots of ourselves, the hired mare and the caravan. A useful side effect was that locals stopped taking us for authentic tinkers at whose marauding approach they had better rush out and gather up their hens.

‘Are ye the Wards or the Redmonds?’ village outposts had been challenging us before the press enlightened them.

Originally neither Stevie nor I was to have come on the caravan trip at all. Instead we were to have stayed as paying guests with the Butler family at their house, Maidenhall, in County Kilkenny.

Seán and Hubert Butler, who would be hailed with surprise as a brilliant and insightful essayist when his collected writings were published towards the end of his life, were allies. Indeed some of his early essays had appeared in the Forties in
The Bell
. And Conor Cruise O’Brien, who delivered the eulogy at Seán’s funeral in 1991, would note that during the dark days of native Irish oppression,
censorship and deference, three men had defended Liberalism. Of these, one was a Catholic, one a Protestant and the third, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, an agnostic. The three – Seán, Butler and OSS – had supported each other in many skirmishes, and Stevie and I had been happily parked with the Butlers on earlier occasions. Indeed, a nightmare which I used to get must connect with one such visit. In it I am trying to straddle a runaway carthorse whose back is so wide that I come close to doing the splits as I cling to its mane while it gallops through a small Kilkenny town. The horse has neither reins nor saddle. A rope has been tied around its middle and a voice, which I think of as belonging to Hubert Butler, is noting – as it may well have done in reality – that I bounce when trotting ‘like a pea on a plate’. I suspect this dream-memory was a conflation of two emotions: stress and indignation, arising from what happened when we left Maidenhall for Gougane.

The reason for leaving was that no sooner had we been dropped off with our hosts than Stevie fell ill with something troublesome, whereupon the Butlers got in touch with our parents asking them to come back and take us away. Which they did. But as Knockaderry had been let for two weeks, we couldn’t go back there. So willy-nilly the caravan became a home from home for myself and Seán as we headed west, while Eileen and Stevie stayed in hotels and tried to keep pace with us by taking buses in the same direction. It was a rainy summer, so we were held up by floods and took refuge where we could, while doing our best to cope with rural setbacks, like the one when the mare got so bloated that she couldn’t get between the shafts, and rustic wags – a Cork speciality – assured us that the way to deal with this was to stick the prongs of a pitchfork in her belly. I forget how we solved her predicament, but don’t remember anyone doing that.

Then real trouble struck. On reaching Gougane we found that the recently arrived English writer, Honor Tracy, whom Seán had met through John Betjeman, was waiting at our hotel, which had
no room to offer her. Small boys had already been sent in various directions to ask if any cabin had a spare room or bed. None did. It was the height of the tourist season; no booking had been made for her and she clearly had not been expected. Equally clearly, my mother was put out by her presence, and, judging by subsequent developments, some of the Dubliners staying in the hotel lost no time informing anyone who didn’t know that Seán and Honor were thought to be what is now called an item. I, who was too priggish – and worried on Eileen’s behalf – to admit to myself that I had guessed this, clung to the belief that their friendship was as innocent as the one he enjoyed with Mother Hogan. Honor was a touch too plump, and I thought of this as veiling her subtler attractions. At the same time I was drawn to her myself. She had a thrilling laugh and a directness which astounded me, since Irish women then were rarely straightforward about anything. Indeed, apart from Jasmine, she was the only person I knew who not only spoke her mind, but did so with wit and relish in a seductively musical voice.

Seán sometimes described her as looking like a Maillol sculpture and had once produced a photo of one to show what he meant. It reassured me. Men, I supposed then, wanted women to look like Greta Garbo, whereas Honor must have been one and a half times her size. Her hair was an agreeable carrot colour, and her amused smile had a perfection which, in those days of bad dentistry, you hardly ever saw. Earlier in Dublin, she had – I guessed even then – set out to charm me because she knew that Seán and I were close. Saying so makes her seem as calculating as an old-time villainess, like Madame de Merteuil in
Dangerous Liaisons
or Henry James’s Madame Merle. Perhaps she really was like them and had to be, precisely because she didn’t look like Greta Garbo. Or perhaps stating things candidly, as I am now trying to do, is always a form of betrayal. The vague, shifting view of her which I had held at the start was probably closer to
the way things were. It is also more charitable. But then, as we were starting to learn, Honor did not aim to depend on anyone’s charity. She would take what she wanted if she could.

When we had parked the caravan in the hotel yard, found someone to look after the mare, and were wondering what to do next, I could tell that my parents felt uncomfortable. Perhaps they were remembering that shortly before Honor first arrived from England, they had received a letter warning them that she was a dangerous woman who had bewitched the famous orientalist, Arthur Waley, under whom she had worked in the Ministry of Information. Perhaps the letter-writer had worked there, too, and been trained as an informer. The word seemed to carry no stigma in England. The Ministry sounds, doesn’t it, like of something in a book by Orwell and almost too appropriate for such a letter? I forget the precise words this one used, and whether, indeed, it was anonymous, but remember clearly that they described Honor as having insinuated herself into Arthur Waley’s life and ruthlessly taken it over. She was likely, said the letter-writer, to do this again with someone else, so the Irish, who were unaccustomed to snakes, had better look out because she was an accomplished one. I remembered Seán and Eileen laughing over the letter and wondering whether it had been sent as a joke or by someone whom she had displaced. Probably a woman. The thought made me wish I need never grow up.