The Pritchett Century (16 page)

One of my acquaintances among the gentry class—how naturally one associates the word “gentry” with the same class in old Russia rather than with an English equivalent—took me down to a mansion he had inherited together with a title he detested. He was not one of the raffish, shooting kind, and he was too simple and plain a fellow to care much about the brilliant group of Anglo-Irish intellectuals who still dominated Irish life. He was a bit deaf and was thought dull—“I hear he’s a decent kind of feller.” He was by way of being a gentleman socialist, and the “good society,” in that sense, interested few Irishmen. The decent fellow had a social conscience and had to bear the curse of land-owning. It had fallen on him by accident. As a poor boy he had been sent off to Canada where he became a Mountie; in the war he had been one of the early flying men. Suddenly he came into “the place”; he married a beauty whom he bickered with, because he refused to have anything to do with fashionable life in Ireland, London or Italy. His real taste—but as a social reformer—was for low life on the Dublin quays. After I left Ireland I heard he had sold his mansion to the nuns, as many Irish landlords did in the end (the Irish Church having a shrewd eye for property) and cleared off, at a moment’s notice, without telling a soul, to America. He is now dead.

This week-end was my only experience of Irish country house life in the Civil War. It was still sputtering away when we drove off in a little French racing car with planks strapped to the side of it. This was to outwit “the clowns” on his estate who had burned down the mill he had built—part of his practical socialism—and had dug trenches across the key roads to prevent him getting home. A true Irishman, he was more than half on their side. At each new trench we got out, put down the planks and drove across. He loved the comedy.

We drove into a large demesne. The mansion stood empty above its lake; he had built himself an efficient little villa near it. When we got in, we found the house had been invaded by “Irregulars,” who had come searching for guns and ammunition. The servants were hysterical and a parrot imitated them, calling out “Glory be to God.” He went
up to his bedroom, slid back a panel in the wardrobe: there was a good supply of untouched weapons, but girls among the raiders had gone off with his wife’s riding clothes, and one of the men had emptied a gallon jar of ink over the drawing-room carpet. The raiders had found a safe in the estate office, but could not open it. So they dumped it in the middle of the lake. My host rang up the local military who put on an offensive.

“We’ll send down the Terrorizer,” the officer said. The Terrorizer and his men rowed about the large lake very happily. It was a lovely afternoon. Her ladyship came down in the evening. She was a slender and handsome, dark-haired woman with fine features and an amused sparkle in her eyes and a despairing voice. She treated me very kindly, but firmly, as the social peculiarity I was, because I had not changed into a dinner jacket. (I hadn’t got one.) Still, despite her high-class groans, she was an amusing and witty woman. The more snobbish she became, the rougher her husband.

“She’s talking a lot of rot,” he’d say down the table, jerking his thumb at his wife. I felt, like another Pip, one of my moods of Miss Havisham worship coming on, for a caustic, mocking tongue and beauty combined were irresistible. I put on dog and burst out with a long speech about a new book of D. H. Lawrence’s.

“What extraordinary things are going on,” she said. “How very unpleasant.”

The next two days I was put through a short course in Irish country house life. We went out fox-cubbing in the rain with a lot of wind-reddened country neighbours. We got very muddy. I was never one for the sporting life. We went for a drink to a large dark house where the family portraits looked like kippers. A man was dumbstruck when I told him I didn’t hunt, shoot or fish. “What do you do?” he asked coldly. I naturally supposed this was directed at my employment. I told him I was a journalist. He looked shocked and had never heard of the paper. Trying to think of a comparable English paper, I said, “It’s like the
Manchester Guardian.
”

He stepped away making a few short sarcasms about that traitorous “Sinn Fein rag.” In Ireland, it is nowadays, I believe, called “The Niggers’ Gazette.”

The following afternoon we went riding. I had never been on a horse before. To me the animal smelt of the leather trade. I was surprised to find that horses are warm. I gripped the reins as if they were a life line; I was jellied and bumped by its extraordinary movement. The party began to canter and I was tossed in the air and I got a fixed smile on my face. We arrived in a field to try some jumps. A wicked old trainer shouted bits of advice. I went over one or two gaps and arrived, surprised and askew, but still up. So they tried some more difficult jumps. The party hung about waiting for the slaughter. The animal rose, I fell on its neck, but I did not come off. The stakes were raised; at the next jump the horse and I went to different parts of the sky. I was in the mud. I got up and apologized to the horse, which turned its head away. Afterwards we walked and trotted home; it seemed to take hours. Back in the house, I felt someone had put planks on my legs and turned my buttocks into wooden boxes. So my life as an Irish sportsman and country gentleman came to an end. Still, I had stayed with a baronet. I was snobbish enough to be pleased by that.

I like curious clothes. Back in Dublin I stayed in my riding breeches, bought at a cheap shop in Dublin, and wore them for weeks after, as an enjoyable symbol of the Irish habit of life, until someone tactfully suggested I looked like a stable boy.

There was one seminal and lasting gain in my time in Dublin. The Irish revel in words and phrases. Their talk is vivid and inventive. They live for the story. I had no idea of what kind of writer I wanted to be, but there were many, in the flesh, to offer me a new example, and who woke something in me.

In their twilight, the Anglo-Irish, especially, had discovered their genius. Yeats was in Merrion Square, A.E. was editing the
Irish Statesman
next door but one; James Stephens, Lennox Robinson, Lady Gregory were there. And so was the young Liam O’Flaherty—not Anglo-Irish—and Sean O’Casey was working in his slum room on the North Side. There were other good dramatists and there were the gifted actors and actresses of the Abbey Theatre where I went every week. There one could see not only the plays of Synge and writers of the Revival, but masters of tragic form like the unjustly forgotten T. C. Murray, and Shaw, Ibsen and Strindberg. Literature was not to be
studied or something to be caught up with, but to be practised and at once. In writing, the stories of Liam O’Flaherty excited me for he had the Irish gift of writing close to the skin of life. The best Irish writers have always had a fine surface. They have always had élan. The writing is clear and sensuous and catches every tremor of movement in the skin of the human animal and of landscape. The prose is athletic and flies along untroubled as if language were their life. Then, the Dublin bookshops were excellent. It was in Dublin that I read Katherine Mansfield, Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence, and Joyce’s
Dubliners
and hoped to catch his sense of epiphany. In 1923 the short story, like the one act play, had a prestige. I wrote my first stories in Ireland and Spain.

Living among writers who were still at their good moment added to my desire to emulate them. I had the—to me—incredible sight of the beautiful Mrs W. B. Yeats riding a bicycle at St Stephens Green; and of A.E. (George Russell), also riding a bicycle and carrying a bunch of flowers. I had tea with James Stephens one Sunday at that hotel at Dun Laoghaire where people go to day-dream at the sight of the mail-boat coming in from England, that flashing messenger to and from the modern world. This gnome-like talker sparkled so recklessly that one half-dreaded he might fall into his teacup and drown. One afternoon I took tea with Yeats himself in his house in Merrion Square.

It was a Georgian house, as unlike a hut of wattle in a bee-loud glade as one could imagine. To begin with, the door opened on a chain and the muzzle of a rifle stuck through the gap. A pink-faced Free State soldier asked me if I had an “appointment.” I was shown in to what must have been a dining-room but now it was a guard room with soldiers smoking among the Blake drawings on the wall. Yeats was a Senator and he had already been shot at by gunmen. Upstairs I was to see the bullethole in the drawing-room window. Presently the poet came down the stairs to meet me.

It is a choking and confusing experience to meet one’s first great man when one is young. These beings come from another world and Yeats studiously created that effect. Tall, with grey hair finely rumpled, a dandy with negligence in collar and tie and with the black ribbon dangling from the glasses on a short, pale and prescient nose—not long enough to be Roman yet not sharp enough to be a beak—Yeats
came down the stairs towards me, and the nearer he came the further away he seemed. His air was bird-like, suggesting one of the milder swans of Coole and an exalted sort of blindness. I had been warned that he would not shake hands. I have heard it said—but mainly by the snobbish Anglo-Irish—that Yeats was a snob. I would have said that he was a man who was translated into a loftier world the moment his soft voice throbbed. He was the only man I have known whose natural speech sounded like verse.

He sat me in the fine first floor of his house. After the years all that remains with me is a memory of candles, books, woodcuts, the feeling that here was Art. And conversation. But what about? I cannot remember. The exalted voice flowed over me. The tall figure, in uncommonly delicate tweed, walked up and down, the voice becoming more resonant, as if he were on a stage. At the climax of some point about the Gaelic revival, he suddenly remembered he must make tea, in fact a new pot, because he had already been drinking tea. The problem was one of emptying out the old tea pot. It was a beautiful pot and he walked the room with the short steps of the aesthete, carrying it in his hand. He came towards me. He receded to the bookcase. He swung round the sofa. Suddenly with Irish practicality he went straight to one of the two splendid Georgian windows of the room, opened it, and out went those barren leaves with a swoosh, into Merrion Square—for all I know on to the heads of Lady Gregory, Oliver St John Gogarty and A.E. They were leaves of Lapsang tea.

I can remember only one thing he said. We had got on to Shaw whom he disliked. I murmured—showing off—something about Shaw’s socialist principles. The effect on Yeats was fine. He stood now, with a tea pot full of tea in his hands, saying that Shaw had no principles. Shaw was a destroyer. Like lightning, Shaw flashed in hilarious indifference, and what the lightning briefly revealed was interesting but meaningless. This has always stuck in my mind, but of the rest I remember nothing except that with solemnity he pointed to the inner door of the room and said that, sitting in this room, he had experimented in thought transference with Mrs Yeats who sat in her room next door. As I say, I had seen her out on her bicycle and I have often wondered, as the eloquent mind expelled its thoughts to the wall, whether Mrs Yeats was always next door at the time. He was kind
enough to walk with me to the Irish Senate near by, and I was overcome when he leant on my shoulder while he lifted a foot, took off his shoe and shook out a stone. I noticed he had a pretty blue ring on one of his fingers.

I went to see A.E. in the office of the
Irish Statesman
, the weekly review that preached cooperative farming. He was a large tweedy bunch of a man with a beard, a talker who drowned me in beautiful phrases of a mystical, theosophical kind. The walls of his office were an extension of his mind, for they were covered with golden murals of ethereal beings. He must have been the kindest and most innocent man in Ireland, for he was a slave to the encouragement of young writers. When I wrote my first story, he took it at once, kept it for two years, and almost with tears of apology sent it back saying it was crowded out. This was inevitable. A.E.’s talking overflowed into print and occupied nearly the whole paper. I sat again with both Yeats and A.E. at Yeats’s house, while Yeats praised D’Annunzio and A.E. tried to argue him out of the admiration. I watched on Yeats’s fireplace, for A.E. distracted himself during Yeats’s long utterances by making designs in the soot with Yeats’s poker.