And unquestionably it remains, but perhaps at certain places and in certain times, a country corrosive of the spirit. For each time you arrive anew in America, you find how small you are and how dismally you impress against the giantness and power of this country where you are so obviously and, with millions like yourself, so totally fatally expendable. And as you wake up to the throbbing airways and roaring cars, you wonder when will it ever be solemn, quiet and calm. Where no one thing matters further than at that peaceful moment. Where everyone who has his constitutional chance to shove his elbow in your ribs, as he constantly does, will step aside and say excuse me. Where your ears can hear a telephone call. Without the garbage trucks grinding in a giant hullaballoo down the street. And that somebody is going to wake up some morning in that wide awake land and say stop, don’t tell me things. Let me for Christ’s sake have my breakfast in peace. And give my wife a sock to darn and a fist in the gob instead of the new dress she wants from I Magnin’s. And maybe then when he’s told his damn noisy kid to shut up and be thankful he has a skate board, he himself will be a good gentle honest citizen. Even though, as you always know, that it is a country you can’t beat. It only beats you. And gets plenty of practice in two hundred years.
1976
Rat Holes and Magic Places
Upon being asked by the French magazine Actuel which place had been magical in one’s life and what was the worst rat hole you visited, the following are my two answers.
The place which I have always regarded as being magical is the small cemetery of De Passy, the walls of which border the Place du Trocadero in the sixteenth district of Paris. This small oasis behind its anonymous walls on the edge of throbbing boulevards to which one would walk years ago along Avenue Kléber from the Hotel Raphael. Arriving under the stone archway and stepping through the gates, one would always find, in late sunny afternoons, black garbed ladies lurking within its tiny paths polishing and cleaning and replacing flowers on the graves of their departed spouses. In this quiet place reeking of respectability and sadness it made one feel that there was hope for us all as husbands. Its narrow lanes, some lined with shady trees and faded elegant mausoleums, were haunted with their departed lives. The reposing souls of so many distinguished inhabitants made one feel this was the one most marvellous place to fall in love, reminding one as it did of women who must have worshipped their husbands.
The worst rat hole in the world is a place I have never actually visited. But have imagined it to be from the description of a friend, an eccentric English peer, who was always in favour of sampling the bizarre, whom I had sent there, the friend thinking that I had already been, and that it was a place possessed of some astonishing special beauty. I was staying in Copenhagen in Denmark at the time and each morning from my hotel window I could see departing a boat or hydrofoil or hydroplane which said ‘Malmö’. For an entire week I attempted to catch one of these boats which left twice a day for this town in Sweden, and each day got more and more desperate as I would invariably rush out of my hotel and down on to the street but always fail to catch the boat before it departed. Back in London when I heard that my friend was visiting Copenhagen, I said you must absolutely must visit Malmö. Somehow my desperation over an entire week of missing getting there made me imagine Malmö to be one of the most amazing and stunningly beautiful places on earth, which I might now be destined never to see. Then a month or so later, upon confronting my friend, again I asked him did he get to Malmö. I could tell by his slightly quizzical frown that something was very wrong. Especially when I asked him what it was like. Then he said my God, you mean you’ve never been there. I said no. He then, with a great sigh of relief, told me that because he felt he somehow was missing the point of Malmö, which was nothing but a depot and an industrial wasteland, he sat hungry and cold, all day long on the only bench in the place, patiently waiting for the miracle of Malmö to reveal itself until suddenly he thought he had at last discovered the reason I’d sent him there, when a man wearing white long underwear came along riding a tall ancient bicycle.
1983
To London from Mullingar
It’s a great century for the Irish. For never in the history of nations has such an abrupt about face come. Literature, art and music sweep this island as never before. Where the creators of such may now dream of their profits tax free. Under legislation which has made much amend for all the great previous wrongs done to its word makers. Who indeed are now in turn this nation’s benefactors. As much as Shakespeare has for England, James Joyce now awakens a tourist industry which has every Sean, Finn and Patrick tradesman coast to coast, who may not have read more than three of his four letter words, now eagerly vending artefacts by the dozen in his memory. Reverently marking the spots in Dublin city where he tippled, stopped to think or bent to tie his shoelace. And yours truly, as much a huckster as any man, may as well get in on the act. For James Joyce slept here. Under the same roof under which I write.
Instead of purveyors of banned literature and their plays taken off the stage, authors have now become revered saints for sightseers. No longer pilloried, their mini busts are cast in bronze and even an effigy of one of them reposes in a glass cage stationed in my local hotel lobby. And not without a deservedly justified reason, for James Joyce, while his father was doing a census, came to Mullingar. He now sits sedately life sized in wax, his legs crossed, feet shod in plimsolls and reading a book, not two miles away from where I myself sit and wake up in this mansion arisen out of this glowing emerald land. In his manuscript of Stephen Hero, Joyce described coming up this house’s drive, entering its door, walking along its hall and stepping out on its terrace overlooking an orchard where he saw a man sitting in a garden chair.
I have reason to think of James Joyce when I am on my way to London. Following in his footsteps from a stone paved hall supported by a vaulted ceiling below, to go downwards on a flight of cantilevered sandstone stairs to a great stone slab landing and look back up above and then down another flight of chiselled black grey stone steps. Like him, I know I will soon be crossing the great Bog of Allen mentioned in his short story ‘The Dead’. I see out over these hills and the shimmering reflected light of the waters of Lough Owel. A pony and trap takes me past the deer park’s rolling meadows enclosed by their limestone walls. Enter up the steps of the same grey cut stone built train station where a young Joyce must have also stood in this midland isolation to take the train. The ticket seller who always courteously makes sure he has a cheery tiny conversation for his every customer, making the purchase sound like a friendly sort of bargain. And these little pleasures encountered are needed to buoy the spirits under grey skies in this summer’s endless rain. On the station a big clock made in Manchester leisurely ticks away the time. A wire cage built in a corner where chickens straying in transport can be kept to cluck and squabble. With damp seeping down its walls I walk within this engineering miracle under the tracks in the same tunnel where Joyce also lugged his portmanteau. On board the railway car as I look back along the platform, the station master holds open a train door as a late arrived lady and little girl hurry up the steps. A small courtesy you might wait a long time to see elsewhere in the world.
In Joyce’s day there would have been steam engines instead of two thundering diesels shaking the ground pulling us out of the station. Past marshalling yards and sheds full of fertilizers and timber, where beyond their roofs twin spires of the cathedral loom over the town. Down below the high embankment of the tracks lie terraces of white walled and grey slate topped suburban houses which would have once been countryside. But soon come the meadows at their purple, yellow and blossoming peak and, with white may waving and poison golden ragwort, the landscape reaches the horizon. Between buttercups sprinkled in the green, small herds of cattle graze, beef to the heel as Joyce said of Mullingar girls. This rainy summer hammering farmers as flat as their crops into the ground. Clumps of hay in the fields rotting dark brown. In the shade of hedgerows tall thistles and sou
r grass. Symbols of why an Irishman will cut down a tree to catch the seldom sun.
But suddenly there’s nothing to block out the sky as we now travel this vastness of bog. Its brown scraggly stems of wild heather. Its landscape lonely, unchanged and bereft. Staring upon its sombre wastes stretches one’s mind all the way to the Urals of Russia. Peasant small piles of drying turf stacked above the shiny edged watery ditches out of which they’ve been cut. To make when they glowingly smoulder the sweetest smoke ever sent into the sky. But from a solitary deserted cottage, ivy overgrown, no smoke comes out as it would have done in Joyce’s time. A big handed farmer sits across the aisle staring out the rain streaked window. You know he’s noting the good pastures that pass from the bad and that he’s got his own cattle to count and watch back in his fields. As we approach this Dublin shambles of a city, a stone hits the train window. A lady sitting opposite assures me we’re aseat on the best side to avoid flying glass.
Out of the Irish sky and away from its unkempt capital city, I land in an English summer afternoon and venture into the much and by many loved metropolis of London. I go on the underground transport. Smooth well groomed cool Americans step in the car fresh from the airport. A young man in a yellow tee shirt with a single bundle pack of luggage and just arrived tanned off the plane from California. He can’t stop smiling as three kindly young London boys heap upon him their maps and a girl next along the seats tries so desperately hard to be pleasant and gain his undivided attention to tell him what to visit and see. An American mother loaded with guide books recites to her children their itinerary, reeling off the names of places which will be crammed into the next few ensuing days. And the lonely wastes of Ireland vanish in the pleasant sophistication of this city.
As one has done over so many years, I hasten to make my first London act that of going to Fortnum’s for tea. Greeted by the waitresses, taking a seat and awaiting the arrival of lapsang souchong with lemon slices and the chocolate yumminess of Sacher Torte. One mildly mourns the passing of this once cosy homey and elegant eatery now become a big shiny and glittering room. But a most minor qualm as an ancient friend turns up. As authors do, we talk of royalties and litigation first and then delve into the wonders of being alive. Especially among these summery golden people strolling these elegant pavements as we set out along Jermyn Street past the men’s fashion and shirt shops towards St James’s. Instead of walking my fields swinging a gentleman’s thistle cutter, counting cattle and petting horses, Ireland’s green fields and Joyce are aeons away. And here grazing on the luxury, one can only purringly covet the unaffordable ownership of silks and silver. But all still so alluringly attractive merely to stroll free of spending, variously in and among these perennially soothing byways of Mayfair. The soft brick, the gleaming windows, the domes, arches, posts and lintels preserving their histories. These buildings as familiar as the faces of people and their expressions changing in the late afternoon light and preparing for the glamour of evening. Just as they’ve done over all these years and for all these passing feet.
Tucked away in the corner of its little park, I enter the secular peace of Farm Street Church. And stay awhile. Before I go to gently click my heels on the white tiled interior peace of Claridge’s. Past this hotel’s sweeping staircase ascending to its pampering comforts above. Behind a pillar in a corner I sip a pale cold glass of champagne. And think back across the Irish sea. To the Joyce haunted train station of Mullingar. Its granite walls and bow fronted windows facing east. It is night now across the lonely darkness of the Bog of Allen. Where only a train’s ribbon of light may pass. Wheels throbbing on the iron rails. Ferns at the foot of the green walls of ash trees wave along the track. Somewhere out there in that sad obscurity. Where another author’s mind did dwell.
1986
Come to Cong Where the Glamour is Still Glowing
When God dropped that little bit of green in the north east Atlantic ocean between longitudes wet and latitudes chill, and there was in a trice this pleasantly peasant little island nation resting on the waves, the Almighty had no idea that such bereft place would become an emerald hued mecca for tourists. For in recent years, bestirred out of its moist windswept primitive simplicity, this toy country with its make believe people is now esteemed the world over for the courteous generosity and friendliness of the inhabitants. And although many would say God be with the good old days when we were an oppressed backward ignorant dominion, nevertheless numerous are glad that at last we have not only freedom but plumbing, electricity and also plenty of publicity.
Ah but now let me tell you within the confines of a potato skin, or while you’re having your black beer they call Guinness, that despite the avalanche of soft toilet tissue, ice cubes, central heating and other sophisticated hot and cold modern paraphernalia, and even American TV beamed down from orbits high, there’s still to be found absolutely a plethora of folksy rusticity here. In a country where pain, frugality and discomfort have long been the norm of the natives and rather than benumbing the spirit, they indeed thrive on it. And perhaps it is not surprising that insanity in this place is less noticeable in the people than it is anywhere else on earth. And alas it suits them, accounting as it does for much of the charm and the curious remarks you’ll overhear as you stand elbow to elbow crushed between the natives in a local tavern.
‘Ah now this pub is always jammed packed, no wonder no one ever comes in here.’
The first thing to remember about Ireland, where the grass stays fresh and its most famed beer is piquantly sweet and velvety dark, is that there is an abundance of genuine Irish living here who adore having an equally genuine American in their midst. For, though they tolerate, they are not exactly enamoured of the sight of the predictable artful shrewdness of one another. And the more credulous and gullible the foreign visitor the better. And ready to please Americans, who with their matter of fact fairness and half knowing the lingo, and who leave their business acumen at home, are particularly welcome with open arms. Especially by your man in the old shambles of his antique store as he points out to you the genuine Stradivarius violin he’s only recently rescued from a monastery. And which, although a bit banged up and needing only a few new strings, is signed inside with the name of its maker. Indeed there it is, to be seen legibly writ through the vent of the sound hole. And you could do worse than to ignore the little legend you spy underneath, ‘Made in Germany’, and buy it for the rock bottom price of twenty two pounds. You might only get a piece of junk but it’s perfect for breaking over the head of an indifferent waiter back home and you’ll also have the remainder of your days vociferously blessed by the wishes of good luck from the proprietor.
However, in spite of the friendliness and the bargains to be had everywhere, always keep a wary guard up while you’re enjoying a quiet refreshment in your better class of hotel lounge. And keep your violin near, as you might get a fist in the gob meant for someone else, when Paddy from beyond the bog comes roaring drunk into the village and, angry about being alive, rages in every direction knocking over the modern invention of the lampshade and then wears it on his head as he tries to make love to the wall. But as soon as he finds out how solid the latter is, he’ll sing you ballads and tap dance a jig.
So with so much vicarious entertainment to choose from in Ireland, the mind boggles at where to go west to a small personal place in which to take a singular pleasure. Be there so many nestled here and nestled there and tucked in beyond everywhere. And being that every village and hamlet is suitably small and particular and gets personal in an instant. In fact the land coast to coast, if you ignore the miles of bogs and mountains of granite, is veritably dotted with them. Ah but a little caution here. Many tiny metropoli would make your hair stand on end with the barren loneliness and the crumbling and deserted houses. Albeit that more than a few of them are disguised with their rotting remnants of lace curtains left still hanging in the windows, and with maybe a rusting sign still readable on a shopfront to say there were once cigar
ettes sold there. And to which vicinity or village a hapless American couple might venture, and stop dead in their tracks while the husband wasted no time to gather up his sensible courage to say to his wife.
‘Hey, Mabel, what do you say we get the hell out of here.’
Yet there are those places, although not leaping and jumping alive, which at least have their buildings intact and into which and out of which goes living life. And few would be so pleasant, peaceful and purring as a little place of three hundred souls, called Cong. Out on the western granite dotted reaches of Galway between the lowland plains of Ellertrin and the bulging grey mountains of Connemara, this village, made an island by rivers, sits quietly safe from harm on a corridor of land dividing the great long loughs of Mask and Corrib. These two haunting bodies of water lie like seas stretching north and south, and the winds blowing upon them can raise white caps and in the force of a storm can sink boats beneath their waves. And you might, judging by the natural isolation, think you were coming to a place of desolate obscurity. And you’d be wrong. Because once a Hollywood film was made here. To christen it with a lasting fame. And to this day the older inhabitants have never forgotten the stars of The Quiet Man who once briefly glamorized their world.