De Valera's Irelands (26 page)

Dr Ó Faoláin did not ordinarily attend at the Council's offices at all. He was in daily telephonic communication and arranged that he would visit the premises for a half-an-hour on two occasions each week. This was his prac­tice, and he did not use during his tenure of office either a room or even a desk.
61

Ó Faoláin lectured in the United States for two months in the spring each year and tried to keep in touch with Council business by corresponding with Wall. In April 1958 this arrangement caused a serious problem be­cause the annual accounts could not be passed without the director's signature. Ó Faoláin apologised to Wall: ‘I'm sorry about this … For me the directorship has to be a part-time job, as I made clear to the former Taoiseach and it is in these 2 months that I mainly make the annual in­come of the O F.s.'
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Ó Faoláin was never able to convince himself that the Arts Council's existence was sustainable with minimal funding. In November 1958, two years after his appointment as director, he began to consider resigning from the post. He wrote to Thomas Bodkin:

I have become gravely discouraged by the Arts Council's work. In sum I am obliged to pose to myself and to the Council the blunt question: Can the Arts Act be considered a fully workable Act within the intentions of the Legis­lature and at a constant level of achievement in accordance with the standards of the Council members, while being permanently endowed with a sum inadequate to implement its terms of reference? By my standards it cannot. [The sum was £20,000 each year during his directorship]. The Coun­cil can only do (some) useful work (a) by ignoring large parts of their terms of reference, and (b) by lowering their own personal standards.

This is going to be understood by NOBODY outside the Council and not by everybody in it … The result is inevitable. So if you hear of my wish to with­draw from an unequal battle do not be surprised.
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Bodkin sympathised with Ó Faoláin's predicament. He replied:

The great trouble is, of course, that nobody in Ireland, with the exception of John Costello, and very few others, is prepared to pay more than lip service to the cause of the Arts; a cultivated class in the full sense of the term, has ceased to exist in our country, and the present methods of education are not likely to encourage the growth of one to serve us in the near future. It was made clear to me years ago that the civil servants and the vested interests do not want to touch Art, fine or applied. Yet I would urge you strongly to try and hold on to the directorship of the Council. There is no one but your­self who can fill the position with any credit or utility at the moment.
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Ó Faoláin decided that he no longer wanted the position. He let it be known that he intended to resign as director with effect from 1 July 1959. He wished to take up the post of resident Fellow and Lecturer at Prince­ton University, New Jersey.
65
In the month of his resignation, the Arts Council moved from 45 St Stephen's Green to more spacious premises at 70 Merrion Square, a fine Georgian residence which had been the home of the writer, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73).
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An exhibition room was opened on 27 October 1959 with a display of modern and antique English silver.
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The change of premises was an important move and signalled the arrival of the Arts Council as an established institution. It now had a respectable address close to government buildings where it still resides today, and had secured considerable independence thanks to the courage of Seán Ó Faoláin.

I came to write through reading. It is such an obvious path that I hesitate to state it, but so much confusion now surrounds the artistic act that the simple and the obvious may be in need of statement. I think reading and writing are as close as they are separate. In my case, I came to read through pure luck.

There were few books in our house, and reading for pleasure was not approved of. It was thought to be dangerous, like pure laughter. In the emerging class in the Ireland of the 1940s, when an insecure sectarian state was being guided by a philistine Church, the stolidity of a long empty grave face was thought to be the height of decorum and profund­ity. ‘The devil always finds work for idle hands' was one of the warning catch phrases.

Time was filled by necessary work, always exaggerated: sleep, Gael­ic football, prayer, gossip, religious observance, the giving of advice – ponderously delivered, and received in stupor – civil war politics, and the eternal business that Proust describes as ‘Moral Idleness'. This was confined mostly to the new emerging classes – civil servants, policemen, doctors, teachers, tillage inspectors. The ordinary farming people went about their sensible pagan lives as they had done for centuries, seeing all this as one of the many veneers they had to pretend to wear, like all the others they had worn since the time of the druids.

During this time I was given the free run of the Moroney's library. They were Protestants. Old Willie Moroney lived with his son, Andy, in their two-storeyed stone house, which was surrounded by a huge or­chard and handsome stone outhouses. Willie must have been well into his eighties then, and Andy was about forty. Their natures were so stress-free that it is no wonder they were both to live into their nineties. Old Willie, the beekeeper, with his great beard and fondness for St Ambrose and Plato, ‘the Athenian bee, the good and the wise … because his words glowed with the sweetness of honey', is wonderfully brought to life in David Thompson's
Woodbrook
.

Willie had not gone upstairs since his wife's death, nor had he wash­ed, and he lived in royal untidiness in what had once been the dining- room, directly across the stone hallway from the library, that dear hall­way with its barometer and antlered coat rack, and the huge silent clock. The front door, with its small brass plate shaped into the stone for the doorbell, was never opened. All access to the house was by the back door, up steps from the farmyard, and through the littered kitchen to the hall­way and stairs and front rooms.

David Thompson describes the Moroneys as landless, which is un­true, for they owned a hundred and seventy acres of the sweetest land on the lower plains of Boyle, itself some of the best limestone land in all of Ireland. The farm was beautifully enclosed by roads which ran from the high demesne wall of Rockingham to the broken walls of Oakport. The Moroneys should have been wealthy. They had to have money to build that stone house in the first place, to build and slate the stone houses that enclosed the farmyard, to acquire the hundreds of books that lined the walls of the library. David Thompson, though, is right in spirit, for Willie and Andy had all the appearance of being landless.

Most of Andy's time was taken up with the study of astronomy. Willie lived for his bees. He kept the hives at the foot of the great orchard. They both gathered apples, stored them on wooden shelves in the first of the stone houses of the farmyard, and they sold them by the bucketful, and seemed glad enough for the half-crowns they received. As a boy, I was sent to buy apples, somehow fell into conversation with Willie about books, and was given the run of the library. There was Scott, Dick­ens, Mere­dith and Shakespeare, books by Zane Grey and Jeffrey Farnol, and many, many books about the Rocky Mountains. Some person in that nine­teenth-century house must have been fascinated by the Rocky Mountains. I didn't differentiate, I read for nothing but pleasure, the way a boy nowadays might watch endless television dramas.

Every week or fortnight, for years, I'd return with five or six books in my oilcloth shopping bag and take five or six away. Nobody gave me direction or advice. There was a tall slender ladder for getting to books on the high shelves. Often, in the incredibly cluttered kitchen, old Willie would ask me about the books over tea and bread. I think it was more out of the need for company than any real curiosity.

I remember one such morning vividly. We were discussing a book I had returned, drinking tea with bread and jam. All I remember about that particular book was that it was large and flat and contained colour­ed illustrations, of plants and flowers probably, and these would have interested Willie because of the bees. The morning was one of those still true mornings in summer before the heat comes, the door open on the yard. Earlier that morning he must have gone through his hives – the long grey beard was stained with food and drink and covered his shirt front – and while he was talking some jam fell into the beard and set off an immediate buzzing. Without interrupting the flow of his talk, he shambled to the door, extracted the two or three errant bees caught in the beard, and flung them into the air of the yard.

I continued coming to the house for books after the old beekeeper's death, but there was no longer any talk of books. Andy developed an in­terest in the land, but, I fear, it was as impractical as astronomy. Because of my constant presence about the house, I was drawn into some of those ventures, but their telling has no place here.

I have often wondered why no curb was put on my reading at home. I can only put it down to a prejudice in favour of the gentle, eccentric Moroneys, and Protestants in general. At the time, Protestants were piti­ed because they were bound for hell in the next world, and they were considered to be abstemious, honest, and morally more correct than the general run of our fellow Catholics. The prejudice may well have exten­ded to their library. The books may have been thought to be as harmless as their gentle owners. For whatever reason, the books were rarely ques­tioned, and as long as they didn't take from work or prayer I was allow­ed to read without hindrance.

There are no days more full in childhood than those days that were not lived at all, the days lost in a favourite book. I remember waking out of one such book in the middle of the large living-room in the barracks, to find myself surrounded. My sisters had unlaced and removed one of my shoes and placed a straw hat on my head. Only when they began to move the wooden chair on which I sat away from the window did I wake out of the book – to their great merriment.

Nowadays, only when I am writing am I able to find again that com­plete absorption when all sense of time is lost, maybe once in a year or two. It is a strange and complete kind of happiness, of looking up from the pages, thinking it is still nine or ten in the morning, to discover that it is past lunchtime; and there is no longer anyone who will test the quality of the absence by unlacing and removing a shoe.

Sometimes I have wondered if it would have made any difference if my reading had been guided or structured, but there is no telling such things in an only life. Pleasure is by no means an infallible, critical guide, W. H. Auden wrote; but it is the least fallible. That library and those two gentle men were, to me, a pure blessing.

A time comes when the way we read has to change drastically or stop, though it may well continue as an indolence or pastime or drug. This change is linked with our growing consciousness, consciousness that we will not live forever and that all human life is essentially in the same fix. We have to discard all the tenets that we have been told until we have succeeded in thinking them out for ourselves. We find that we are no longer reading books for the story and that all stories are more or less the same story; and we begin to come on certain books that act like mirrors. What they reflect is something dangerously close to our own life and the society in which we live.

A new, painful excitement enters the way we read. We search out these books, and these books only, the books that act as mirrors. The quality of the writing becomes more important than the quality of the material out of which the pattern or story is shaped. We find that we can no longer read certain books that once we could not put down; other books that previously were tedious take on a completely new excitement and mean­ing: even the Rocky Mountains has to become an everywhere, like Mans­field Park, if it is to retain our old affection.

That change happened to me in the Dublin of the 1950s. Again, I think I was lucky. There were many good secondhand bookshops in which one could root about for hours. One book barrow in particular, on a cor­ner of Henry Street, was amazing. Most of the books found there then would now be described as modern classics. How the extra­ordinary Mr Kelly acquired them we never asked. Those were times when books were discussed in dance halls as well as in bars. It was easy then to get a desk in the National Library. The staff were kind and even would bring rare books on request. There were inexpensive seats at the back of the Gate Theatre, and there were many pocket theatres, often in Georgian base­ments. Out in Dun Laoghaire there was the Gas Company Theatre where we had to walk through the silent showroom of gas cookers to get to see Pirandellor or Chekhov or Lorca or Tennesee Williams.

The city was full of cinemas. I remember seeing
Julius Caesar
with Gielgud and Brando playing to full houses in the Metropole. At week­ends, cinema tickets were sold on the blackmarket. One such black­mar­keteer, a pretty girl I knew, showed me a fistful of unsold tickets one wet Sunday night shortly before eight o'clock and said, ‘If I don't get rid of some of these soon – and at bloody cost at that – I'll have to let down me drawers before the night is out'. And there was the tiny Astor on the quays where I first saw
Casque d'Dor
,
Rules of the Game
and
Children of Paradise
.

Much has been written about the collusion of Church and State to bring about an Irish society that was insular, repressive and sectarian. This is partly true, but because of the long emphasis on the local and the individual in a society that never found any true cohesion, it was only superficially successful.

I think that women fared worst of all within this paternalistic mish­mash, but to men with intellectual interests it had at the time, I believe, some advantage. Granted, we were young and had very little to lose, but the system was so blatantly foolish in so many of its manifestations that it could only provoke the defence of laughter, though never, then, in pub­lic. What developed was a Freemasonry of the intellect with a vigor­ous underground life of its own that paid scant regard to Church or State. Even an obscene book, we would argue, could not be immoral if it was truly written. Most of the books that were banned, like most books pub­lished, were not worth reading, and those that were worth reading could be easily found and quickly passed around. There is no taste so sharp as that of forbidden fruit.

This climate also served to cut out a lot of the pious humbug that often afflicts the arts. Literature was not considered ‘good'. There was no easy profit. People who need to read, who need to think and see, will al­ways find a way around a foolish system, and difficulty will only make that instinct stronger, as it serves in another sphere to increase desire. In no way can this clownish system be recommended wholeheartedly, but it was the way it was and we were young and socially unambitious and we managed.

The more we read of other literatures, and the more they were dis­cussed, the more clearly it emerged that not only was Yeats a very great poet but that almost single-handedly he had, amazingly, laid down a whole framework in which the indigenous literature could establish traditions and grow. His proud words ‘The knowledge of reality is a secret know­ledge; it is a kind of death', was for us, socially as well as metaphorically, true.

The two living writers who meant most to us were Samuel Beckett and Patrick Kavanagh. They belonged to no establishment, and some of their best work was appearing in the little magazines that could be found at the Eblana Bookshop on Grafton Street. Beckett was in Paris. The large, hatted figure of Kavanagh was an inescapable sight around Grafton Street, his hands often clasped behind his back, muttering hoarse­ly to himself as he passed. Both, through their work, were living, exciting presences in the city. I wish I could open a magazine now with the same excitement with which I once opened
Nimbus
: ‘Ignore Power's schisma­tic sect,/Lovers alone lovers protect'. (The same poet could also rhyme catharsis with arses, but even his wild swing was like no other).

When I began to write, and it was in those Dublin years, it was with­out any thought of publication. In many ways, it was an extension of reading as well as a kind of play. Words had been physical presences for me for a long time before, each word with its own weight, colour, shape, relationship, extending out into a world without end. Change any word in a single sentence and immediately all the other words demand to be rearranged. By writing and rewriting sentences, by moving their words endlessly around, I found that scenes or pictures and echoes and shapes began to emerge that reflected obscurely a world that had found its first expression and recognition through reading. I don't know how long that first excitement lasted – for a few years, I think – before it changed to work, though that first sense of play never quite goes away and in all the most important ways a writer remains a beginner throughout his work­ing life. Now I find I will resort to almost any subterfuge to escape the blank page, but there seems to be always some scene or rhythm that lodges in the mind and will not go away until it is written down. Often when it is writ­ten it turns out that there was never anything real behind the rhythm or scene, and it disappears in the writing; other times those scenes or rhy­thms start to grow, and you find yourself once again work­ing every day, sometimes over a period of several years, to discover and bring to life a world through words as if it were the first and (this is ever a devout prayer) last time. It is true that there can be times of intense happiness throughout the work, when all the words seem, magically, to find their true place, and several hours turn into a single moment; but these occur­rences are so rare that they are, I suspect, like mirages in desert fables to encourage and torment the half-deluded traveller.