Once (21 page)

When we set off it was a brilliant morning of April, and the green, glittering waves seemed to toss the canoe among themselves; yet as we drew nearer this island a sudden thunderstorm broke out behind the rocks we were approaching, and lent a momentary tumult to this still vein of the Atlantic.

 
or this:

The rain continues; but this evening a number of young men were in the kitchen mending nets, and the bottle of poteen was drawn from its hiding-place.

One cannot think of these people drinking wine on the summit of this crumbling precipice; but their grey poteen, which brings a shock of joy to the blood, seems predestined to keep sanity in men who live forgotten in these worlds of mist.

I sat in the kitchen part of the evening to feel the gaiety that was rising, and when I came into my own room after dark, one of the sons came every time the bottle made its round, to pour me out my share.

 
I liked the sound of Michael, Synge's guide on Inishmaan, but I wasn't hooked as Synge was by a primitivist ideal. I was more taken by those ‘half-civilized fishermen', as he chose to call them, individuals he encountered on a visit to Inis Mór, the big island. These men were inclined to despise the simplicity of life on Synge's preferred middle island, Inis Meáin. They wanted to know, what still interests me: how Synge passed his time ‘with no decent fishing to be looking at.'

But it was the overall Synge-song of the prose I really liked. Its rhythms soon stole my attention from itself. Strong tributary streams I found elsewhere, in late Dylan Thomas, and early, among those boys of summer in their ruin and in his estuarine ‘Author's Prologue'; in the T.S. Eliot of ‘Prufrock', especially the closing paragraph, and ‘Dry Salvages'; in Lawrence's ‘Ship of Death'; in what eventually I could understand of Baudelaire, and a very little Tristan Corbière, which I think I got at through a reference in Eliot. But you must understand these things were all seen as through a glass darkly. I was seduced symbolically. I didn't have precocious powers of understanding. I didn't need to stop to ask if I understood. The thing was different. Something in it ran away with me. I ran away with it, like a thief. I was more interested in my sensual life, which now, most passionately, included the sensual life of words.

A very little went a long way with me. So it does still. So it does here, in the same sense that often can mean rarely, and once is more than enough, as you know. A glance from the Welsh girl, for example, a dismissive glance no less than a longed-for come-hither. When I read my favourite writers I could hardly hold my eye to the page without shooting off in my own direction. I wasn't a good reader. I'm still not a good one. Nor am I a scholar any more than I am a gentleman, please my maker.

Then last of all in the genre, beyond the end of school, Richard Murphy's
Sailing to an Island
which I bought in Dublin at Green's Bookshop near Trinity College, on just turning nineteen, after a pilgrimage on my summer dreyman's Border Breweries wages, to Inis Mór, prospecting. I have the copy still, as I have most of them, above all among them: John Bright's ‘Charles Jones Memorial Prize for Literature' – winner's choice:
The Plays and Poems of J.M. Synge
; but
The White Goddess
, and
Six Existentialist Thinkers...
are more recent replacements, the originals going the way of all books, as life takes one here and there. But what days they were, for that wide-eyed boy of summer in his ruin.

A longer catalogue of reading there was, but these works and authors were the most telling ones, and also fragments of MacDiarmid put my way by a Welsh nationalist autodidact, Meirion Roberts, a man who did more than anyone to broaden my reading, except perhaps the late Charles Jones, but that's a story for later, just round the corner. Meirion put Robert Graves's
Goodbye to All That
in my hand, and I loved it for the good riddance of it, the rejection of the world as ordained by one's supposed betters and the powers that be.

Your country needs you! But what ish my nation? Wales, I was born there.

Meirion would travel with my father when he came to visit me on Inis Mór to disturb my universe, to comic effect. Here's a poem that tells you more about him, and explains something of his interest in Graves's book, more concisely, ‘In Memory of Private Roberts: British Soldier':

 

Crossing the square in early spring,

Wreaths withered on the memorial,

Poppies bled by frost and snow,

I met Private Roberts reading

The roll call of the town's fallen.

‘Armistice day? My pet aversion,'

Turning to me, his lip moist,

His thorny eye narrowed like a sniper's:

‘Ior Evans? He'd never spent

A night away from home before,

 

Buried in Mad-a-gas-car.

Corner of a foreign field?

I doubt he'd ever heard of it.

Dei Sam? on Manchester

United's books in thirty-nine:

 

Buried in France. I bet

He's
never remembered

At the going down of the sun

Or in the morning... Duw!

You know, I often contemplate

 

Siegfried Sassoon, chucking his medal away.

Never applied for mine.

All the way to Tobruk without

So much as a lance-jack's stripe,

I'm proud to say.

 

And Francis Ledwidge, born

The same day as Hedd Wyn,

And killed, you know, the same day

And in the same place too.

His comment: “To be called

 

A British soldier

While my country has

No place among nations...”

He'd marched to Vesuvius

With Marcus Aurelius

 

In one breast-pocket and

The
Mabinogi
in the other,

An old campaigner

Over bog and heather

To find and fish the Serw stream:

Elusive, stubborn thread of water,

Of stygian glooms and mountain glances,

Its limpid, garrulous medium,

‘Full,' as he said, ‘of small trout

The length of a youth's hand.'

 
Meirion also lent me in their slender and deeply moving first editions
The Stones of the Field
, first published by the Druid Press in Carmarthen in the year of my birth, and
An Acre of Land
, printed in Newtown, Montgomery, in 1952, by R.S. Thomas. There was hardly anything Meirion hadn't read, from a slender essay by Virginia Woolf about going to purchase a pencil, to Gibbon's
Decline and Fall
, to Logan Pearsall Smith's
Trivia
, from the work of Mary Webb (O
Precious Bane
!) to that of Alun Lewis and
In Parenthesis
by David Jones. He was an inspiration, his gates wide open to the written word and his insight into the colonial situation light-years ahead of the view elsewhere. For sheer intelligence, humour, passion and rootedness he had no equal. He was a postcolonialist
avant-la-lettre
and so was I under his influence, whether I knew it or not; and I certainly knew it if not in name when I entered the unknown world. It was a revelation, and one that has never waned.

It was the sea and the literature of the sea I loved most. I remember particularly being stirred by Joshua Slocum's marvellous sea-going story:
Sailing Alone Around the World
. But it's not so much that I was so taken by the writings I refer to, which in the wider world is something unremarkable, but that as to Aran I held to my resolve. More than once or twice I'd tell my parents, at sixteen and seventeen and more, that one day I was going to live on Inis Mór. How was this? It seemed so unlikely a thing they merely smiled, in the spirit of ‘one day you'll grow up' my son. How pleased I am now to know how wrong they were, especially about the growing up. The way to grow is circular, longest way round, shortest home. Up is a big mistake. Down into mind and round is best.

Who says poetry makes nothing happen, Synge being all poetry, verse or prose? There is no circumstance in which nothing happens. But the assertion burdens poetry with irrelevant expectation. There's the strongest case for saying it makes everything happen, that it's prior to all other verbal forms of expression, vision, and thought. The poets precede the theologians and philosophers and stand elsewhere from them, looking awry. Here's my poem of it. I call it ‘Synge-Song':

 

I was one after your own heart

or so I thought, neither landed

nor gentry, but blew ashore

aboard your limpid pages,

to Inis Mór and there I stranded.

My mind blown away

and all at sea for nevermore.

 

The curragh also wears a thin partition.

I've felt the sea-pulse beneath it

through my hand, life itself,

inside out, outermost to be

inmost in the world.

Get out more, you who say

poetry makes nothing happen.

 

Be-in-the world and see:

the poem is earthbound

and elsewhere to the day

as any playboy knows

down the passage of recorded time

through calm and storm

the first to make landfall.

 
There is or there was once a strong case for saying all mental landscapes in the western world would be profoundly different if Wordsworth hadn't written his
Lyrical Ballads
and its preface, or ‘The Prelude', which also overtook my life at this time, no less than is clearly true in the case of Homer's
Odyssey
, no matter nothing happens without hearer or reader. One or two of either at critical historical moments are enough to bend the world's bias and change the horizons of humankind.

Just a small work of words can set the world atilt. Forget your global network. When the power goes down in the post-apocalypse, and the visionaries rise from the rubble what use your password and your headlong hurry, you intel-pentium? Where is your digitized archive now? You need no password to encounter a poem, spoken or read, oral or written, to nourish your soul before whoever your maker is. Remember that as you scavenge among the ruins of Rome? But those scavengers won't be of your kind. They'll be the descendants of those who scavenge now. Of whom there is no shortage and never has been down the course of time.

To be sure, a little can go such a long way it can reach to the crack of doom, like the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Wanderer'.

 

* * *

 
Or the ‘Sea-farer'.... An element to account for here, beyond the shore, is the sea itself. The sea plays with horizon more thoroughly than anything on earth, than night and day together. I first took to its magical perspectives in yet another ritual connected with my passing the eleven plus. Not only did that singular occasion entail the Black Lake, as you know. It also saw an unprecedented act of extravagance and expenditure by my grandpa. He was otherwise, you know already, rightly deemed the very epitome of a penny-pinching Scotsman. But my little success so pleased him he stunned the known world and took me out for the day, aboard the
St Tudno
, from Llandudno pier, a steamer as they say, though there was no steam involved, to Menai Bridge on Anglesey.

Forget that we played bowls there or before coming home stopped at the fun-fair and rode the dodgems by the gates to Llandudno pier – all staggering indulgences, never witnessed before or again in grandpa's company.

The important thing for me is that I made my foundational sea-voyage then, my maiden voyage. I had been out off
Ynys Enlli in a little mackerel-fishing boat. I'd whizzed a circuit of the inlet at Traeth Coch, powered by a Seagull, as you know. I had a taste for it. But this was a voyage, such as on a more dramatic scale the
Naomh Eanna
made to Kilronan pier and the islands, as later I would love. And it whetted my appetite and fuelled my longing. I've never forgotten it, even if we never lost sight of land. (That would come, on trips to the Isle of Man, as also sailed from Llandudno for a time.)

Often is one thing, once another. I saw the Orme swing round and shrink in our wake. I saw the Creuddyn sink in sea-haze, islanding the Orme, as fascinated and delighted me. I saw the seabirds – the razorbills, and puffins too, the different gulls, the cormorants – whizz in and out from the headland cliffs. I heard and saw the sea run and break, and felt the sure foot of the vessel slide and gather. I breathed the hot air of the engine room, mingled with the salty ozone of the sea. I saw Penmaenmawr, and Puffin Island close up, crowded with seabirds, and the lighthouse, and heard the clang of the bell at Penmon. I saw the pretty doll's house frontage of Beaumaris. I saw Snowdonia on the other shore roll and shift, rearranging its ranges, as we went by. I experienced the strange dream-element that is the world at sea, on a halcyon day. I saw the straits narrow and its currents race on Menai's shore. It whetted my appetite and more. I went under like a cormorant that'd not surface again until it reached Galway Bay, however many years away, in November 1968. My life over again. So breath-taking was it and heart-stopping, it drowned me for good and ill.