Irish Journal
HEINRICH BÖLL
In 1972,
Heinrich Böll
became the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. Born in Cologne, in 1917, Böll was reared in a liberal Catholic, pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prison camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences as a soldier. His first novel,
The Train Was on Time
, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
(1959),
The Clown
(1963),
Group Portrait with Lady
(1971), and
The Safety Net
(1979). In 1981 he published a memoir,
What’s to Become of the Boy? or: Something to Do with Books
. Böll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in June 1985.
Hugo Hamilton
is a novelist and the author of the bestselling German-Irish memoir,
The Speckled People
, about Hamilton’s childhood in Dublin with a German mother and a fervent Irish nationalist father who prohibited the use of English in the house. He is also the author of
Die Redselige Insel
, a travel book in the steps of the Heinrich Böll’s
Irish Journal
, which was published in German by Luchterhand fifty years after the original. He lives in Dublin.
The Essential
HEINRICH BÖLL
The Clown
The Safety Net
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
The Train Was on Time
Irish Journal
Group Portrait with Lady
What’s to Become of the Boy? Or:
Something to Do with Books—A Memoir
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll
Translator’s Acknowledgment
I am deeply grateful to my husband, William Vennewitz,
for his assistance in this translation.
Leila Vennewitz
Vancouver, Canada
Irish Journal
Originally published in German as
Irisches Tagebuch
by Heinrich Böll
© 1957, 1988, 2005 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG,
Cologne, Germany
Translated by Leila Vennewitz
Introduction © 2011 Hugo Hamilton
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:
Böll, Heinrich, 1917-1985.
[Irisches Tagebuch. English]
Irish journal / Heinrich Böll; translated from the German by Leila
Vennewitz.
p. cm.
“Originally published in German as Irisches Tagebuch by Heinrich Boll,
c1957, 1988, 2005 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG,
Cologne, Germany.”
eISBN: 978-1-935554-83-7
1. Ireland–Description and travel. 2. Böll, Heinrich, 1917-1985–Travel–
Ireland. I. Title.
DA978.B5613 2011
914.1504′823–dc22
2011000600
v3.1
CONTENTS
_______________
IRISH JOURNAL
3. Pray for the Soul of Michael O’Neill
5. Skeleton of a Human Habitation
6. Itinerant Political Dentist
Limerick in the Morning
Limerick in the Evening
10. The Most Beautiful Feet in the World
11. The Dead Redskin of Duke Street
13. When Seamus Wants a Drink …
15. A Small Contribution to Occidental Mythology
INTRODUCTION
by Hugo Hamilton
When Heinrich Böll first arrived in Ireland in the 1950s, the country was still asleep. He describes the journey by night across the Irish sea on the mail boat—the Catholic priest with the safety pins, the returning emigrant, the infinite cups of tea and the huddle of whispered conversations. He sets foot at dawn in a place where time is not a measurable substance. Where clocks and language itself are not instruments of exact truth, but of social guesswork. It is a place “far from the center,” where poverty and wealth are still in the hands of God, where the people have not yet woken up from that deep spell of religious faith.
It is into this timeless landscape that the German writer arrives, as Joyce would put it, trying to wake up from the nightmare of history in Europe. Ireland has been untouched by the Second World War. It has also remained untouched by the post-war rush for material certainty. It is a place where the children are “natural,” where the people survive on their humor and reduce their misfortune by saying that things “could be worse.”
Ireland is a sanctuary. An exceptional place which has stalled at an exceptional moment in time, just before it “leaped
over a century and a half and caught up with another five” into modernism. He finds refuge here on the outer rim of Europe and sends home a beautiful literary postcard to his people.
I can still remember this small travel book first arriving by post in our house in Dublin. It was in German, sent by my aunt in Salzburg. For my German mother, it was a verification of her own move across to Ireland. Like Heinrich Böll, she came from the Rhineland, and reading his collection of short, evocative sketches was more like leafing back through her own first impressions. He was speaking out of her mouth, as they say in Germany.
When I got the book to read as a boy, it turned me into a visitor in my own country. I had grown up in Ireland, but there was a familiar tone in the writer’s observations which confirmed to me that I was also a newcomer, from somewhere else. My view of the country and its people was out of register by a few degrees to the east along the map of Europe where it got dark an hour or two earlier than it did in Ireland.
In effect, I had already inherited this book. I had grown up with the writer’s sense of surprise and incomprehension. I understood his innocence, his limited knowledge, his wide-angle enthusiasm, deep with affection at first sight. Perhaps I had also inherited the visitor’s simplistic awareness of what is strange.
Heinrich Böll is the classic traveler, comparing and counting the differences. He wanders around the city of Dublin and hears the people repeatedly saying “sorry,” like an habitual Irish greeting. The banks are not open yet and he cannot change money, but he still manages to get to Westport by train, on trust. The railway staff even phone ahead to let everyone know of the passenger traveling on credit.
He makes his way out to Achill Island and finds a savage beauty in the landscape—silence, weather, anger in the sea, people now and again, and distances which are painful on the eyes.
“… beauty hurts because on sunny days you can see for twenty, thirty miles without human habitation: only azure islands that are not real …”
There is a disclaimer at the beginning of
Irish Journal
which I sometimes feel like hanging around my own neck. “This Ireland exists: but whoever goes there and fails to find it has no claim on the author.”
The invocation to the reader is not to take everything literally. He makes no claim for authenticity. He is telling us only what he sees with his own eyes. Like a modernist painter, Jack B. Yeats, or Matisse, he trusts us to believe the extravagant flight of colors without expecting to find them again in real life. He is aware how quickly the light can change its mind in Ireland.
Of course the people are still saying “sorry” all the time. Of course they still live on their humor and their imagination. But he doesn’t want us to go knocking on the door of the doctor’s house in Achill Island to see if the doctor’s wife really has a lacquered fingernail that looks like a shiny car tracing her husband’s winding journey along the map. Or to ask whether the patient the doctor has gone to call on really has the most beautiful feet in the world. Or where the copper kettle is which he brought back with him as payment on that stormy night.
How can you go back and recover that lyrical moment where a man in his fifties is seen leaving the house and walking away up the hill, becoming younger and younger with each step as he goes, finally looking back as the boy he once was, before disappearing beyond a fuchsia hedge?
Nor does he want us to go looking for the post-office girl at Keel to see if she really does have the eyes of Vivien Leigh. As it happens, I’ve met the post-office girl myself and I can confirm that she has those remarkable, blue-green, celluloid eyes that make you think you’re in a movie. What’s more, so do all her children. But then I haven’t met Vivien Leigh.
The Ireland in this
Irish Journal
does exist. It is there in our past, in our memory. I can claim to be the firsthand witness. I ran around the streets of that Ireland of the 1950s wearing German leather trousers and an Irish Aran Sweater, half Irish and half German. So I can account for this book like my own memory. But as always, our memory comes after us, full of blank spaces and longing and missing things that you could not see at the time. It remains real and vivid, full of intuition, close and personal and brightly unverifiable.
What interests Heinrich Böll is the randomness of Irish life, the luck, the contradictions and the waiting. The whole country seems to be waiting for something. In a cinema facing out towards the Atlantic, the people in the audience are gathered, smoking and talking, passing around sweets and passing around jokes, waiting for the priest to arrive so that the movie can finally begin.
He records the grip of the Catholic Church on Irish society. He includes the gambling and the drinking. But he has not come here as a sociologist or a social worker. He has enough reforming to get on with in his own country, so his role is more that of a passive observer whose own sense of regret is somehow in tune with the people here. He catches the heartbreak of Irish emigration with great accuracy by describing the bus driver waiting politely for the last tears and the last good byes to be said before he can finally put the engine in gear and carry the passengers away into the unknown distance.
He talks about the September children of Achill. Conceived around Christmas when the emigrants return home from England and born in the late summer when the fathers are away. He awaits the birth of one of these September children and allows himself to speak for the mother.
“From here, Nuala McNamara went to New York to sell nylons in Woolworth’s, John became a teacher in Dublin, Tommy a Jesuit in Rome, Brigid married and went to London—but Mary clung doggedly to this hopeless, lonely spot, where
every September for four years she has borne a child.”
Why does Böll call this a lonely spot? What entitlement does he have to see this place as hopeless? Is the visitor not protected from such grief by the ability to go home again? Written into these impressions is the longing which the traveler unlocks within himself. It has touched something in his own heart. There is a denied loneliness in the German people, an unspoken exile which strikes an open-hearted echo here.
The people of Achill have spoken of Böll as a friendly man who was good at telling a story and who smoked as much as anyone else on the island. But underneath the black beret which he famously wore and which made him look like a revolutionary and also at times like a priest, they also found a sadness in his expression. He had sad eyes, I am told.
So perhaps, like the subsequent stream of German visitors inspired by his journal to authenticate this country, Böll has come to Ireland in search of what is missing in himself. That fractured idea of home which the Irish know how to repair. An emotional innocence, you might call it, which has already been removed from Europe. An uncomplicated connection to the landscape and the people which is not so easy in Germany after the horrors of Nazism.