Myles Away From Dublin (3 page)

I presume this week to lay to my heart this flattering unction that the reader who looks at this also saw what I said last week about the havoc and horror of ‘moving house’. I promised to continue the grim record. Today I make the attempt. I write this ‘at home’. Those gaunt words may possibly convey what I mean. I have not yet been railroaded. I am still at home, but in a very quaking one. How soon will the ceiling come down?

The ogre whom I had met in his own office had said that before an estimate could be given, an inspection would be necessary. At the time I thought this reasonable enough. After all, if somebody has to shift something, surely that somebody is entitled to a preview of the stuff to be shifted?

I was in a state of terror. Every knock at the door gave me fresh spasms.

Eventually, the worst happened. Himself was on the doorstep. I had quite forgotten about this sinister term ‘Inspection’ but was soon to learn its true meaning. He was to auction stuff, therefore wanted to know what the stuff was. The true meaning of the word was
The
Great
Snoop
,
the derogation of myself personally and the undisguised implication that my property was rubbish.

I opened the door myself. He stepped into the hall and, to my alarm, started to take off coat and hat. This clearly meant he was going to stay for a while if not, indeed, for a whole weekend. My wife had often reproached me for my bad companions and dissolute pals. What would she make of this situation when she
returned from her morning shopping? It boded ill for me.

‘I’ll just stick this stuff,’ he said, fingering his outer vestments, ‘on the rack.’

The thing I have in my hall is what is commonly called a hall-stand. It is a sort of family heirloom, made of mahogany and at least a hundred years old. At least technically it is an antique and may be of great value. I would be surprised but not quite flabbergasted if a diligent search of its interior revealed the inscription ‘A. Stradivarius fecit’ carefully concealed. Yet this gorilla called it a rack!

‘I hope you’re not going to take this up,’ he said, stamping on the floor of my hall, ‘it’s always better to keep the floor covered when you’re selling. Woodworm, you know. Buyers are cuter than you think.’

It was perfectly good linoleum, bought not two years before. I just gaped. He was already in the main
living-room
off the hall.

‘Well, good heavens,’ he said as if stunned, ‘– what is that?’

‘You mean with the four legs?’

‘Yes, just there in the centre.’

‘It is supposed to be a table.’

He laughed coarsely and made an entry in a small dirty notebook he had produced. ‘We might even call it an
objet
d
’
art
at that,’ he remarked. ‘The legs is all bawways. But we could throw it in with something worth flogging. People count every half crown these days, you know.’

He sat down on a chair but got up very suddenly and led the way into the next apartment, which I like to call the drawing-room. I’ll admit it’s a bit old-fashioned and I never really liked the faded yellow wallpaper. But the armchairs, in heavy brocade, were attractive in their own way and the great gilt mirror over the mantelpiece was truly a work of art, the frame having been designed by some unknown Italian master. My inspector paused on the threshold as if startled.

‘I suppose,’ he said, leering, ‘that you will be looking for a small fortune for the hearthrug? Or should we call it a bit of fancy carpet?’

I followed his pointing finger.

‘You mean at the fireplace? That is not a hearthrug and is not for sale. That is Annie. Annie is a sheepdog. That clear?’

One humiliation followed another. Perhaps the worst occurred in my bedroom.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘A pantry?’

‘It is not a pantry,’ I said acidly.

‘Another table,’ he said without heeding my tone, ‘Why on earth have you a soiled blanket on it?’

‘You mean that article by the window. It has four legs but it is not a table.’

‘Well what is it if I’m not asking you to spill a secret?’

‘It’s my bed.’

‘Mean to say you sleep in that? Well, well …’

And so it went on. He called my inlaid walnut wardrobe ‘the press’. It was just one litany of insult. When about to take his merciful departure, he said this:

‘I’ll ask Kelly to come and have a look and give us a price. But I’ll tell you a funny thing about shifting furniture.’

‘What?’ I asked, frankly dismayed. He put on an oracular frown.

‘It costs just the same,’ he intoned, ‘to shift good stuff as junk. Sometimes it costs more because rubbish often collapses when it’s moved. The removal man has to allow for that. Everything here is riddled with woodworm. But the men who deal in this sort of trade are cute enough. I know one character that takes on decorating jobs, hanging paper and all that. He has one iron rule. In an old place like this, he will paper the whole place for you but he’ll put the new paper on top
of the old. Know why?’

‘I do not.’

‘If you were to take the paper off the walls of an ancient joint like this, the walls might collapse. The paper holds the house together. Do you follow?’

I showed him out. What else could I do? Then I nearly passed out.

In the last year or so I have come to suspect that I am possessed of a great blessing which will bring me great solace, happiness, and the boon of the eternal ever-new; or else that I am labouring under a terrible curse, a sort of cerebral derangement that sooner or later is bound to get me into serious trouble.

The other night I was at my bookshelves looking for a certain volume and was surprised to see there
Lady
Gregory’s
Journals,
1916
–
1930,
edited by Lennox
Robinson
. Where had this come from? I opened it at page 96 – the secret page on which I write my name to catch out borrowers and book-sharks – and my signature was there all right. The book was mine. I opened it here and there and found nothing I could recollect as having seen before. Eventually I sat down and read the whole thing, and every bit of it was new. Yet I MUST have read it before. You see my dilemma? I seem to have the gift of totally forgetting in a very short time everything I read. This miraculously renews my library every year or so.

It was not an old book – first published 1946 by Putnam. ‘Old book’? What am I talking about? Beside it on the shelf were two others. One was Xenophontos Kurou Paideias – Biblia Okto, published in London in 1765; among the printers was T. Caslon, a member of the family of great typefounders after whom the Caslon fount is still named. Greek text impeccable, all footnotes and comment in faultless Latin; probably a valuable volume. The other book was a collection of poems by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1842. Nothing
remarkable
in that, perhaps, except for the inscription on the title page in spidery faded writing: ‘William R. Hamilton, Observatory’. Imagine the great inventor of quaternions wallowing in Tennyson!

It is a fascinating book, though the
Journals
are necessarily severely abridged. Augusta Perrse was born in 1852 at Roxboro’, Co. Galway, and strictly of the old landlord class, her father at one time owning over 4,000 acres. In 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, an MP, of nearby Coole Park. He died in 1892 but she had one son, Robert, who was killed in the 1914 war. Sir Hugh Lane was her nephew and the recent tortuous
part-return
of the Lane pictures has brought Lady Gregory’s memory back to many people, for those pictures were one of the great worries and preoccupations of her life.

The urge to keep a diary is a curious one, and can even be dangerous. What a to-do there has been over those Casement diaries! But in those 42 typewritten volumes of
Lady
Gregory
’
s
Journal
,
she has left a vivid portrait of herself, her friends and contemporaries, and her times. She wrote well and had an amazing memory right to her death at the age of 80 in 1932.

On her husband’s death she naturally took over Coole Park and, although never quite severing her ancient landlord allegiance, she took an extraordinary and kindly interest in the local people, was interested in all flower and plant life, became deeply engrossed in folklore and local customs, in due course came like her neighbour Edward Martyn to support avidly the Gaelic League and virtually became a sort of upper-class separatist and Republican, though her sympathies here lay more in the cultural sphere.

Most people are aware of the main compartments of her career: her life-long friendship with W. B. Yeats; the Abbey Theatre, her tasks there in both management and playwriting; the Lane pictures; and her experiences in both the Black-and-Tan terror and the Civil war, followed by the slow establishment of the Free State. Her day-to-day account of those last-named episodes is extraordinarily impressive and vivid, for such an account has an immediacy that any formal history
written long in arrear must lack. Her narrative of
Black-and
-Tan terrorism – the murders, beatings, burnings, robberies and looting – would startle those younger people whose personal memory does not embrace that terrible era. Her own position in remote Coole required courage, for her interest in native things and people was not healthy when demented Black and Tans were at large and unused to making fine distinctions; but of personal courage it is clear that she had any amount.

The Abbey, its genesis and growth, was the focus of her life and personality, and many people will be absorbed by the first timid appearance and the development and triumph of the well-loved players so many of whom are now dead – Sally Allgood, F. J. McCormick, Michael Dolan, Arthur Sinclair, Will Shields, and many more. Another different if complementary panorama is
presented
in the comings and goings of the many new playwrights the Abbey brought forth; money was always tight, there were constant rows and bickerings and nearly everybody concerned – players and playwrights alike – had to have their first reliance on ordinary modest jobs by day. Normal pay for a top actor was for many years of the order of £4 a week, and these were people who created a new theatre and a new mode of acting. Barry Fitzgerald was in late middle age before he could dare to throw up a modest job in the civil service. Yeats himself was, of course, a great inspiration to all but he was by no means a man of affairs and often caused annoyance and irritation.

Sean O’Casey was the centre of the greatest upheaval. After the great success of
Juno
had established him,
The
Plough
and
the
Stars
led to disorders and near-riots very reminiscent of Synge’s
Playboy
opening. But when the Abbey Board rejected the
Silver
Tassie
,
the row and recriminations were immense and led to O’Casey’s
self-imposed
exile. Yet nobody could quarrel with Lady Gregory herself, not even O’Casey.

There are many intimate little portraits of famous people who were Lady Gregory’s friends – Bernard Shaw, Sir Horace Plunkett, Lady Ardilaun, Gogarty, A. E. Martyn, George Moore, James Stephens and many others. It is perhaps no coincidence that they were all not only talented but also very decent people, for it is impossible to imagine Augusta permitting herself to associate with wrong types. She had a sense of humour, too, and is quite funny about the take-over of the
Viceregal
Lodge, the arrival of Tim Healy and the succession in due time of the MacNeills.

I never met Lady Gregory but some six or seven years ago I accompanied Michael Scott, the architect, to Coole; he had been retained to design a plaque for Yeats’s Norman Tower at Ballylee, hard by. We visited Coole itself, now in the hands of the Land Commission. The wooded approach drive is magnificent but of Lady Gregory’s beloved mansion not one trace remains.

The father of Benjamin D’Israeli, later to become the Earl of Beaconsfield, was Isaac D’Israeli, with the
lifespan
of 1766–1848. He was a writer and much interested in a subject he called literary history; his reading was vast, his gift for languages exceptional, and his erudition well-founded and deep. Apart from some novels and poems, his best-known work was
Curiosities
of
Literature
which was issued in several parts between 1791 and 1834: it is a veritable treasure-home of what is odd, comic and fascinating.

On a book-barrow I have come on one of the volumes of some 550 pages published in 1839 and today I think I could do worse than purloin some of the facts he has collected under the title of
Literary
Blunders.
At least I will not be infringing his copyright.

The cynicism and doubts of our own age did not exist in Isaac’s day. When Dante’s
Inferno
was published it was widely accepted as a true narrative of the poet’s descent into hell. Similarly when Sir Thomas More’s
Utopia
appeared, nearly everybody believed that this visionary republic really existed, thought the book was genuine history and a movement was set on foot to send missionaries there to convert so wise a people to Christianity.

A certain clownish writer named Dr Campbell published an ingenious work named
Hermippus
Redivuvus
which pretended to be a treatise on hermetic philosophy and universal medicine. So well did he maintain his portentous style, that several educated people were taken in.

He argued that human life could be prolonged by inhaling the breath of young women. Another physician who had himself written learnedly on health matters, eagerly accepted this new doctrine to the extent of taking lodgings in a ladies’ boarding school so that he could have the students’ breath in abundant supply, and many other people took similar steps.

A commentator named Fabiani, quoting a French account of travels in Italy, mistook for the name of the author these words he found at end of title-page
Enrichi
de
deux
Listes
(or ‘Enriched with two lists’). He wrote: ‘That Mr Enriched with two lists has not failed to do justice to Ciampini’ – a district he had visited.

Our anecdotal archivist Isaac, whose family were Jews from Venice, quite often found part of his fun in the writings and doings of ministers of the Christian Church. There is however no rancour in his discoveries. Some of the monks of yesteryear were rather ignorant and one of Isaac’s stories concerns a legal row a certain pastor had with his parishioners concerning the
responsibility
for paying the cost of paving the church. The priest went to the reputed writings of St Peter and quoted the phrase
Paveant
illi
,
non
paveam
ego.
He thought this meant ‘They are to pave the church, not I.’ In fact the Latin verb
paveo
means ‘I am trembling from terror’ and has nothing whatever to do with paving.

Collie Cibber wrote a play he called
Love
’
s
Last
Shift.
It was very popular and in due course translated into French. The translator named it
La
Dernière
Chemise
de
l’
Amour.

The valued Latin writer Petronius was for many centuries famed (or notorious) for the fact that his surviving writings were fragmentary. The world of learning was startled when a professor in Lübeck got a letter from another in Bologna saying, ‘We have
an 
entire
Petronius
here
;
I saw it with my own eyes.’ The Lübeck man hastened immediately to Bologna, sought out his correspondent and asked to be shown ‘the entire petronius’. He was conducted to a church and shown the body of St Petronius.

Another writer, translating a treatise on Judaism from Latin to French, rendered
Omnis
bonus
liber
est
by ‘Tout livre est bon’, a remark that would no doubt enrage our own censorship board.

Still another writer named Tom Brown whom at the moment I cannot identify was translating a composition named
Circe
,
presumably in German, and came upon the word
Starne
,
the meaning of which he was not sure about. Apparently relying on the sound of the word, he translated it ‘stares’. But a later translator went to the trouble of making sure what
Starne
meant and found it was red-legged partridges!

These are merely samples from Isaac D’Israeli’s essay on literary blunders but gives some idea of his tireless search for absurdity. Another day I hope to summarise his comment on other subjects, for there was apparently no limit to his choice of matters for discourse. It is a pity to find nowadays that he is out of print and quite unknown to nearly everybody.