Trespassers (9 page)

Since he was in and out of trouble over libel, and had acquired a reputation as an anticlerical who didn’t hesitate to assail the pillars of Church and State, it may seem odd that I was being taught by nuns at all, let alone by those belonging to an order which – as they would proudly inform us – had been founded to prepare the mothers of France to teach their sons to resist revolutionary thinking.

It was not odd, though, in the Forties.

I had to go to a convent because in those days schools in Ireland were denominational; almost none were mixed; and if you went to the wrong one, as my small brother did when a Protestant kindergarten opened across the road from our house, a priest appeared on the doorstep to protest. Religion was a tribal badge, and my parents wanted neither to leave the real Ireland, nor to relinquish their feeling for the ideal one whose image had animated the nationalist struggle.

Yet it is fair to say that Sacred Heart schools were less
nationalistic
than others. The order’s Mother House was in Rome, and the curriculum approved there could probably not find much space
for Gaelic. This context is unlikely to have been mentioned over the tea cup – or cups. But I could tell that the conversation had been enjoyable. I could tell it by Mother Hogan’s brightening when she mentioned meeting Seán, and his doing the same when he mentioned her. He always liked clever women.

Was
St Patrick, Ireland’s first bishop, arrogant, and did he, like many of his successors, lift his crozier too high? My guess is that, as he was more myth than man, nobody knows, especially as I recall my father’s great friend, the Celtic scholar D. A. Binchy, telling us that colleagues of his had come to think that there could have been two or even three St Patricks. Of more immediate interest here is the likelihood that O’Connor’s poem about the pagan Oisín (pronounced Usheen) defying the saint may have been fuelled by anger against recent Irish bishops.

Politically, their lordships were often autocratic. They had condemned the Fenians in the 1860s and during the Civil War ruled armed resistance to the new, legally elected government to be immoral, thus virtually excommunicating the whole Republican side. Some went further, including the bishop of Cork, who instructed his clergy to refuse Republicans the sacraments. This
rankled bitterly with Seán’s and Frank’s comrades who, when defeated, on the run, and at risk of being shot out of hand if caught with guns, must frequently have felt in acute need of absolution lest, by dying in a state of mortal sin, they go to a worse hell than the one they were in, which was after all what the bishops had ordered their flock to believe. Knowing this, a number of Cork priests, some of whom may have had Republican sympathies, disobeyed their bishop whose ukase, as Seán later wrote, ‘was considered by all Republicans an abuse of clerical power. It was never to be forgotten or forgiven.’

He himself did not forgive it, and when my brother and I were small, one of Seán’s best-kept secrets was that, if he was a Catholic at all, he was no longer a full-time one. As there was nothing unusual about members of a household going to different churches, and there were three within walking distance of our house, it would be years before I guessed that on Sunday mornings he and Binchy were likely to be walking out Dún Laoghaire Pier when the rest of us supposed them to be at Mass: a shift designed to avoid giving scandal to Binchy’s housekeeper, his and our neighbours and my brother and me. A similar ambivalence must have driven generations of Irishmen to take similar measures, some of whom believed in but no longer practised their religion, while others disbelieved but shrank from breaking with their community. Despite endless conversations on the topic, I don’t know to this day to which category Seán belonged and I suspect that neither did he.

He was tough when it came to criticising the actual Church and State, but all toughness melted before the memory of his and Eileen’s love affair with Gaelic culture and their first encounter with it by the shores of Lake Gougane Barra. So on wartime holidays we went back regularly to remember their youth, as old friends foregathered and danced and sang to old tunes, and Father Traynor, who planned his summer visits to coincide with
theirs, said Mass in Gaelic in the small lake-island church which Seán attended, presumably more from friendship than fervour.

Years later I learned that anti-clericalism had been infinitely harsher elsewhere than it ever was in Ireland. The French Revolution, after all, had seen priests guillotined; Mexico, to this day, forbids any but Franciscans to wear clerical dress in public, and I met a man in Italy whose parents had given him the name Ateo, meaning ‘Atheist’. An Irish equivalent – ‘Atheist Murphy’, say, or ‘Atheist Ó Faoláin’ – is imaginable only as a bar-room joke. This is partly because anti-clericals often remained friendly with ordinary priests who, in relaxed moments, were apt to confide that they suffered more from overbearing bishops than the laity ever did. And indeed it was when Seán went into print with jokes about how Bishop Browne of Galway bullied his clergy that Browne launched a libel action. Such was my mother’s innocence and my own (I am going back now to when I was eight), that we were slow to see the danger of this, for I clearly remember us being cheerily hailed, when out walking, by young priests who asked us to relay their congratulations to Seán on his having stood up to the bully. We agreed light-heartedly. Soon, though, it grew clear that, given Browne’s resources and the bias of English libel laws in favour of plaintiffs, Seán could not fight him in court. Neither did his publishers intend doing so. On the contrary, in a letter to
The Irish Press,
they disowned and apologised for his book. And I, as a child moved by impotent fury, became an anticlerical of the extreme sort which Italians call a
mangiaprete
or ‘priest-eater’.

Seán had been rash – or else had been trailing his coat. ‘Truly,’ he had written of Galway, ‘I never met such a place for scandalous gossip … I wonder, is it libellous to repeat the sad tale of the bishop and the curate, as I heard it in a Galway pub?’

One can only marvel at Seán’s chutzpah. He proceeded to describe Browne as ‘an arrogant-looking man, much in favour, I gather, with the de Valera government; not so much in favour with
the clergy.’ ( Who, it is clear from what follows, were forbidden to go to the cinema.) ‘At any rate,’ Seán reported, ‘one afternoon the blonde at the box-office heard a voice over the telephone asking if Father X was inside at the show. On asking whose the voice was and on hearing the thunder of “This is the bishop” the blonde said, “Yerrah g’wan out of that! Are you thrying to pull my leg?” Finally the bishop had to drive down himself, and the terrified blonde was sent in for Father X, who of course said to her, “Yerrah g’wan out of that! Are you thrying to pull my leg?” At last, so the story would have us believe, he was induced to come out, and the poor man found his bishop waiting in the foyer like a figure of the Wrath of God. One version of this awful parable for sinners is that the bishop whirled him off straightaway to his new parish at the back of God-speed …’

The above extract is from
An Irish Journey,
a travel book on which Seán and his old Wicklow neighbour, Paul Henry, collaborated and which Longman published in 1940, Paul supplying illustrations and Seán the text. The bit about the bishop echoes an oral tradition which contrasts with the high flown Yeatsian vision of Ireland. It strikes me, though, as I write this, that Yeats’ s Crazy Jane poems echo the oral tradition too. He could be earthy when he chose – and give hell to bishops.

Here is Jane’s view:

But now Yeats had died, and the gentry who had presided over the Irish literary revival had passed the baton to native writers
whose taste was for the specific, the realistic and the down-
to-earth
.

That same year, along with Peadar O’Donnell, one of Ireland’s rare Marxist activists, Seán launched
The Bell
, a monthly magazine which promised that, with readers’ help, it would focus on ‘the realities of Irish life’. ‘This is Your Magazine’ was the title of Seán’s first editorial, inviting contributions which might help it evolve. ‘That’, wrote Seán, ‘was why we chose the name
The Bell.
Any other equally spare and hard and simple word would have done; any word with a minimum of associations … All our symbols have to be created afresh …’ Meaning, I suppose, that they wanted no rags of old rhetoric, either Celtic or pious. Seán and Peadar were making a stand against the Age of Pretence. What
The Bell
needed, they told possible collaborators, were documentary articles about aspects of Irish life which the authors themselves knew at first-hand. Isolated by neutrality, Irish writers had both a need and an opportunity to renew themselves.

So, in among fiction and verse, the magazine published pieces which reported on, among other topics, the experience of living in an Irish slum, an orphanage and a prison, schoolteaching, migrant workers, a new hat factory set up in Galway by a Jewish refugee, the art of window-dressing, and three extracts from a forthcoming book recording the thoughts of the bilingual Tim Buckley, one of the last of the
Seanachaí
or story-tellers who lived close to Gougane Barra. Buckley, known as ‘the tailor’, though it had been some time since he had worked at the trade, was famous for his mental independence, which locals and visitors alike crowded into his small cabin to enjoy. However, when a writer called Eric Cross made a record of the tailor’s musings and published them in English with an introduction by Frank O’Connor, the book was promptly banned as ‘indecent and obscene’. Not only were the bewildered old tailor and his wife, Ansty, now boycotted by neighbours who grew ashamed of
having enjoyed the old man’s salty wit for years, but worse still ‘three louts of priests’, as O’Connor described them, came round and forced the old man to go down on his knees and burn his copy of the book in his own fireplace. Meanwhile the scandal sparked off a sanctimonious four-day debate in the Irish Senate, reading the official record of which was, wrote O’Connor, ‘like a long, slow swim through a sewage bed’.

The senators’ rancour was almost certainly due to pique at finding that traditional Gaelic-speakers, whom, as patriots, they affected to admire, were neither as pious nor as genteel as they had wanted to think. Indeed, when one speaker read out examples of what he considered to be the book’s obscenities, another demanded that these be struck from the Senate records, lest members of the public start going through them in search of smut.

The year the tailor died, we took our usual holiday in Gougane, but, though we called to condole with Ansty (short for Anastasia) he had already been buried. Seán, however, wrote one of his best stories,
The Silence of the Valley,
about an imaginary visit to attend his wake.

Rereading extracts from
The Tailor and Ansty,
first published in
The Bell
in March 1941, I have just come on the tailor’s thoughts about animals. ‘There is a change somehow,’ he tells Cross. ‘The animals are getting more daring and more intelligent. They are thinking more and they are learning the way we think too. They are not stupid. It is we who are stupid to think they are …’

I was nine when I first read that. It impressed me then and still does, especially as more people seem to think like that now. Here in the West, anyway, animals have come up in the world.

Elsewhere in Cross’s book the tailor observes that, though a number of people who dropped into his cabin had written books and taught in universities, ‘the airiest, wittiest men that ever walked into me were the men who walked the roads’, adding that ‘if a man does not use his own eyes and ears and mouth and
intelligence, he may as well be dead. There’s no man living can’t see a new wonder every day of his life, if he keeps his eyes open and wants to see.’

This implicit rebuke to bookishness reminds me of the prolific Maupassant’s claim that he himself didn’t need to read much because he found the raw material for his fiction by looking carefully at what was going on around him. He even trained both his mother and his valet to report to him on any drama they might come across which he could use in his stories. Perhaps the men who walked the roads performed the same service for the tailor?

Remembering this reminds me of my own mother’s zestful talent for providing writer friends with copy. Eileen had a flair for spotting promising situations and working up what she heard, and I now keenly regret failing to write a tribute, while she was alive, to her bravura when playing this rarely acknowledged role which bridges the oral and literary traditions. Both O’Connor and Seán based short stories on her field reports and, at least once, years later, so would I. The piece I thought of writing about her was to have been called
The Straight Woman,
in memory of those music-hall actors, known as ‘straight men’, who fed comedians lines designed to help make rehearsed witticisms seem spontaneous. Oliver Gogarty, a Dublin wit and poet, actually got her to give him cues like this at one or more of Yeats’s Irish Academy dinners. Perhaps all the old wits achieved their effects by such secret preparation? I remember reading that Mahaffy, who had been Oscar Wilde’s tutor at Trinity College and was a friend of Gogarty’s, had done something of the sort. So the tradition may always have been a collaborative one which the cult of an airy amateurism led artful wits to present as artless.