The Pritchett Century (14 page)

At the photographers I stayed late and typed the thing. I sent it to a London paper and not to lose time I finished two more and sent them. They went to two weekly reviews—the
Saturday Westminster
and
Time and Tide
—and to the
Christian Science Monitor
. There were weeks of iron silence. Then, within a month or two of each other, the three papers accepted them. There! It was easy to be a writer. Outwardly cool and with a curious sense of being naked and exposed, I hummed inside with the giddiness of my genius.

I cannot describe my shame-faced pride. There was no more “I want to be a writer.” I was a writer. Editors thought so, I told the boys and the Scot at the shop. The Scot had his nation’s regard for the written word. The wet-mouthed Breton gaped and punched me in the back. Pierre astonished me. He was always picking up Montmartre songs and about this time his favourites were one about the rising price of Camembert, and a topical one about Deschanel, the Prime Minister who had fallen out of the train on his way to the lavatory, a song with a chorus of innuendo:

He stopped and put on a small act:

“M. Shwep, the great Balzac,” he sang and danced around me. He had picked up the name from the street. At this age boys knew everything.

I told Madame Chapin. She congratulated me, but hers was a face of little expression. Mournfully, after reflection, she said the man who kept the woman for whom she worked was a journalist. I could not tell her how her groans had helped me to write and I felt, when I saw her, how strange it was when she stood bringing in my shirts, that part of her led a ghost life in what I had written. She asked to borrow the first article. She wanted to show it to the priest who came on Saturdays with her boy.

A week later the priest returned it.

“Ah,” he moralized. “At that time you were on the
cinquième
. Now you are on the ground floor.”

There was, to judge by the amusement in his eyes, another meaning to this sentence; like every Frenchman he loved a
nuance
. I read and re-read this article again and again and then, as happens to writers, I was impatient with it and disliked it. I had my first experience of the depression and sense of nothingness that comes when a piece of work is done. The satisfaction is in the act itself; when it is over there is relief, but the satisfaction is gone. After fifty years I still find this to be so and that with every new piece of writing I have to make that terrifying break with my real life and learn to write again, from the beginning.

On a misleading sunny day on the first of February, 1923, I took the train from London to Holyhead. In a heavy leather suitcase I carried a volume of Yeats’s poems, an anthology of Irish poetry, Boyd’s
Irish Literary Renaissance
, Synge’s Plays and a fanatical book called
Priests and People in Ireland
by McCabe, lent to me by a malign Irish stationer in Streatham who told me I would get on all right in Ireland so long as I did not talk religion or politics to anyone and kept the book out of sight. Unknown to myself I was headed for the seventeenth century.

The Irish Sea was calm—thank God—and I saw at last that unearthly sight of the Dublin mountains rising from the water, with that
beautiful false innocence in their violets, greens and golden rust of grasses and bracken, with heavy rain clouds leaning like a huge umbrella over the northern end of them. My breath went thin: I was feeling again the first symptoms of my liability to spells. I remember wondering, as young men do, whether somewhere in this city was walking a girl with whom I would fall in love: the harbours of Denmark gave way to Dublin Bay and the Wicklow Hills. The French had planted a little of their sense of limits and reason in me, but already I could feel these vanishing.

Once through the Customs I was frisked for guns by a Free State soldier with a pink face and mackerel-coloured eyes. I got out of the local train at Westland Row, into that smell of horse-manure and stout which were the ruling Dublin odours, and was driven on an outside car with a smart little pony to (of all things, in Ireland!) a temperance hotel in Harcourt Street. It was on this first trot across the city that I had my first experience of things in Ireland not being what they seem. I have described this in a book on Dublin which I wrote a few years ago. The jarvey whipped along, talking his head off about the state of the “unfortunate country,” in a cloud of Bedads, Begobs, God-help-us-es, but turned out to be a Cockney. The Cockney and Dublin accents are united by adenoids. Cab drivers are, perhaps, the same everywhere.

It was now dark and I went out into the wet streets. Troops were patrolling them and I was soon stopped by a patrol and frisked once more. More friskings followed as I got to the Liffey. It was enjoyable. I didn’t realize that my green velour hat from the Boulevard des Italiens with its wide, turned-down brim, was an item of the uniform of the I.R.A. I went straight to the Abbey Theatre. In the shabby foyer, a small middle-aged woman with grey hair and looking like a cottage loaf, was talking to a very tall man. He was unbelievably thin. He seemed to be more elongated by having a very long nose with a cherry red tip to it. The woman’s voice was quiet and decided. His fell from his height as waveringly as a snow-flake. The pair were Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson. He took me to his office for an hour and then we went into the theatre. To an audience of a dozen or so people (for the Civil War kept people away), the company were going through the last act of
The
Countess Cathleen
, in sorrowing voices. They went on to the horse-play of
The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet
. Both plays had caused riots years before when they were first put on. Now the little audience was apathetic.

Soot came down the chimney in my room at the hotel when a bomb or two went off that night.

The spell got a decisive hold of me in the next two days as I walked about the comfortable little Georgian and early Victorian city, where the red brick and the brown were fresher and less circumspect than the brick of London. The place seemed to be inhabited only by lawyers and doctors. The mists of the bog on which it is built softened the air. Complexions were delicate, eyes were alive with questions. As you passed people in the street they seemed to pause with expectation, hoping for company, and with the passing gaiety of hail and farewell, with the emphasis particularly on the latter. There was a longing for passing acquaintance; and an even stronger longing for your back to be turned, to give a bit of malice a chance.

The Civil War was moving to the south west; now de Valera’s men—called with beautiful verbal logic the “Irregulars”—had been driven out of Dublin. I had seen the sandbags and barbed wire round the Government offices and the ruins of O’Connell Street; now I took a morning train in cold wet weather to Cork from Kingsbridge, the best of Dublin’s monumental railway stations, a station that indeed looked like a fantastic chateau. A journey that normally takes two or three hours, took close on fourteen, for at Maryborough (now called Port Laoise), we stopped for the middle of the day, while they got an armoured engine and troops to escort us. I had seen pictures of these extraordinary engines in books about the Boer War: I suppose the British had dumped a lot of them in Ireland. One of the exquisite pleasures of the Irish (I was soon to find out) is pedantry: a few of us, including a priest, left the train and went into the town for a drink, sure of finding the train still there after a couple of hours. It was. It gave a jolt. “Are we starting?” someone asked.

“Sure, we haven’t started starting yet,” the porter said.

The afternoon faded as we went across the bogland; at Mallow it
was dark, and there we got into cars to join another train across the valley. The viaduct had been blown up. We eventually arrived in Cork in a racket of machine-gun fire. I hesitated. But the passengers took it for granted and a barefooted urchin who took my case said: “ ’Tis only the boys from the hills.” The firing went on, from time to time, into the small hours, and patrol lorries drove up and down. One stopped at the hotel and after a lot of shouting and banging of doors, a posse of soldiers came into my room, got me out of bed and searched the bedding and my luggage. They looked respectfully at my books and one of them started reading a poem of Yeats and said if I kept to that I would be all right.

Cork is a pretty city, particularly in the dappled buildings of its riverside quays and estuaries. By this time my mind was singing with Irish poetry. I went out into the countryside to see how Blarney was surviving the revolution. It was surviving in the best of its tradition. I plodded round with a farmer whose chief ejaculation was a shout of “Blood and hounds,” when his narrative needed it. It often did. Back in Cork, I went to the theatre where Doran’s touring company were playing a different Shakespeare tragedy every night: my earliest experience of
Macbeth, Othello
and
Hamlet
. Doran’s company had been slogging away in England and Ireland for years. He himself was a sturdy man with a huge voice. He hogged the plays of course, and put such a stamp on his roles that it was pretty well impossible to distinguish Hamlet from Macbeth, or Macbeth from Othello. The theatre was always packed. When Hamlet said his line about everyone being mad in England, the whole house cheered. I had gone with a commercial traveller from Kerry, who came back to the hotel and then he and one or two other commercials recited Shakespeare to one another for the rest of the evening. I couldn’t understand a word the torrential Kerryman said, but Shakespeare was tempestuously Elizabethan in a Kerry accent.

I travelled across Tipperary to Limerick, arriving there in one of those long soft brown and yellow sunsets of the West, with the white mists rising from the Shannon. The Celtic twilight was working on me. I sat up drinking with a satanic engineer; and, thinking it was about time, I tried that night to write one of my articles. I found that after two or three whiskies my pen swept across the paper. When I read the
thing in the morning, I saw it was chaotic and I tore it up. That is the last time I ever wrote on alcohol.

Limerick was in an edgy state. It had just been relieved of a siege and there was still a crack or two of sniping at night. There was a strike on at the bacon factories; and there was an attempt to start a Soviet. I went to see the committee and politely took my hat off and made a small French bow when I went into their room. The leader told me to put my hat on: they had finished, he said, with bourgeois manners. We had a wrangle about this because, although I am shy, I am touchy and argued back. We had a rapid duel of sarcasms. He was one of those “black” Irishmen one occasionally comes across; there was another, a waiter at the hotel in Limerick who threw a plate of bacon and eggs at a customer. He was a big fellow who looked murderous every time he came into the dining room with a plate.

There occurred in Limerick one of those encounters which—looking back on it—I see as a portent. I found there a very serious young Englishman, in fact a Quaker, who took me to a house inside the town. As we climbed up on an outside car, he whispered to me not to talk on the long ride out because, he said, his situation was delicate. He had caught the Irish love of conspiracy, even the whisper. When we got to his house he told me he had been in the fighting against the Sinn Feiners, but had lately married an Irish girl. I think he had been in the Auxiliary Police. Except for having his tennis court shot up now and then, he said, when he and his wife were playing in the afternoons, there was not much trouble now. The English have stubborn natures but, I saw, could get light-headed in Ireland. Into the sitting room, which was furnished in faded Victorian style, with pictures of lakes and vegetation on the walls and the general Irish smell of rising damp, came an elderly woman wearing a wig of black curls and with a sharp, painted face; and with her a pale little girl of twelve—I thought—one of those fey, unreal Irish children with empty blue eyes and untidy russet hair. She looked as if she had been blown down from the sky, as, in her tiny skirt, she sat bare-legged on the floor in front of the fire. She was
not
a child of twelve; she was the Quaker’s wife, and very excitable. The shooting, she said, livened up the tennis and they were afraid for the strings of their rackets, because in these times you might have to send them to Dublin to be re-strung. A brother-in-law came in, a man who sat in silence
breathing sociably, as Guinness after Guinness went down. I gazed from the old lady to the girl, from brother-in-law to the ascetic looking young Quaker soldier, and could not see how they could be together in the same house. In how many Irish families was it to seem to me that the people had all appeared accidentally from the wheel of fortune, rather than in the course of nature. The old lady chattered about balls and parties, about Lord this and Lady that, about the stage—was she an actress? In her wig, paint and her rings, bracelets and necklace, and her old-fashioned dress of twenty years before, she was nimble and witch-like. Indeed, she got out a pack of cards and told my fortune. I dropped the Queen of Spades. She sprang on it with glee: