I shouted just in time for Behan to retreat, as the bull, with lowered horns, charged. Behan, shouting in Irish, his unlaced shoes flying off, ran across my strawberry patch and was hopelessly trying to climb the slippery bough of an ash tree. Up which a moment later he suddenly got instant assistance, the bull squarely levering him from behind, his arse mercifully between the horns and ascending skyward into the tree. Where Behan clung to the branches as the beast pawed the ground, his massive weight uprooting and nearly overturning the tree, with Behan clinging to the uppermost bough with all his might.
“Jesus, Mike, as if I needed any more reasons to hate the countryside. While you’re down there, and before I fall out of the tree, would you ever tell the fucking beast in its ear in English to go away, as he doesn’t understand the words ‘fuck off’ I’m saying to him in Gaelic.”
Dodging battering and stabbing with my pitchfork, I finally maneuvered the bull amid his cows and drove the herd back through the gaping hole they’d made in the fence. And then scourging myself on brambles and blackthorns, I struggled to fill the gap with torn branches.
My days now numbered in Ireland, the event became one of my last countryside misadventures. Along with many of the frequenters of the Catacombs and of Dublin’s Grafton and Harry streets, Gainor Crist had already fled or departed to England, and others of my Trinity pals had left for very foreign and distant parts. As pages now added steadily to my manuscript of The Ginger Man, and Valerie due to produce an heir, I had now finally decided to sell this small holding at Kilcoole, and after five years in Europe to return to America, land of the beautiful, home of the brave and oasis of the free. And there, with the book’s publication, to await my justified fame and fortune and have at last those symbolic bushel baskets of dollar bills to dump on all disbelievers. But there were warning voices, such as Ernest Gebler’s, to beware of the almighty world of the big, rich and prosperous over there.
A for-sale ad, cottage on four acres by the sea, was placed in the Irish Times newspaper. I was surprised at the sadness expressed by Farrell, my local neighboring farmer, and the Smiths, concerning my departure from this lonely, bereft stretch of coastland. There were tears in their eyes when the time came and we said we were moving away. And there they remained till one afternoon Mr. Smith gently died, and she, Mrs. Smith, died the next day following his funeral.
But then for more than a week there was no response to my ad. When suddenly walking down the long lane with his small daughter, my first possible purchaser came. A weather-beaten retired sea captain who had sailed the seven seas. He had arrived from Dublin by bus and seemed undeterred by the isolation. As he was shown around, he said that he lived on a small holding north of Dublin in an old Dublin tram which was converted to live in and which he was trying to sell. I toured the sea captain about, pointing out the defects rather than the advantages of Kilcoole, and was growing alarmed at his silence that he seemed to have no questions to raise himself and I finally asked him why. Because he said, in my years at sea I’ve met every kind of rogue and prince of every nationality and I’m a good judge of men and I would buy anything from you that you had to sell without question. Impressed by his good judgment, I asked him which of the world’s nationalities in his opinion were the best and worst.
“The best are the Scots and the worst are Belgians. And in the last category, you might include a Rumanian or two.”
As we both already knew, I didn’t inquire an opinion concerning the Irish. But he soon volunteered the fact that there were too many Irish in the worst category to be able to boast of the few best. Alas, this potential purchaser and wondrous gentleman failed to sell his tram and land, and I had to place my advert again. This time an attractive and charming and most unlikely couple turned up. An RAF wing commander and his wife, a physician who had read medicine at Trinity College. And to whom my list of defects appeared pleasant challenges, as they were intending to use Kilcoole as a summer cottage. With hardly any ado, except for some negotiations over missing batteries for a radio, the sale was completed. After three years and my nearly rupture-making improvements and routine physical and nervous breakdowns, I sold Kilcoole for three times my own bitterly bargained purchase price. However, my father did come one summer to this land where he said they did not have a pot to piss in, and with a college pal, a strong swimming champion, Valentine Hinds, helping, played a large part in renovating the cottage. Putting in a concrete floor, which remained dry, and plastering the walls and sending someone for a quart or two of buttermilk each day.
As I liquidated, Ernest Gebler came down from Lake Park in his natty gent’s sports car and haggled away an entire afternoon buying my chattels, from fire tongs, to milk cans, and enjoying to make bargains of most of them. However, the good thing about Gebler, who was so delighting in my discomfiture at such low prices for what I considered my priceless items, was that he would buy nearly anything offered with the only drawback being the abysmal price he’d pay. Previously, his beautiful American then wife had with her excellent taste bought two of my paintings and was even contemplating acquiring my five-seater 1935 Austin 11.9 horsepower saloon automobile, which I never tired of telling was formerly owned by the Protestant Bishop of Meath and would reach a steady sixty-five miles an hour on the straight. But Gebler, owning so many splendid vintage cars already, would not hear of buying my ecclesiastically dignified vehicle. Plus he had used these pictures of mine his lady had bought to block up holes in his estate fence to keep his neighboring farmer’s sheep out. All perhaps why this exotically charming and talented woman, disenchanted with either Ireland or Gebler, who by his own smiling admission was no saint to live with, decamped back to America.
Ah, but later in the evening we repaired to the Grand Hotel, Greystones. Where white-gloved debutantes attended Friday night formal dress dances, and woe betide any gate-crashing hoi polloi who would dare breach the confines of this refined watering place on the coast of Wicklow. For there was a bevy of local rugby players within who could defend its socially comforting elegant confines. And in its light and airy dining room, which looked out over a croquet lawn to sea, Gebler and I sumptuously dined. Ernest, delighting again in the trouncing I’d taken over the dispersal of my poor belongings, now took an even greater delight in assuming a sporting attitude in insisting he pay for dinner. We quaffed wine and sipped brandy, telling and listening to each other’s tales till a late hour, as we’d often done in front of a turf fire up in the forested confines of Lake Park while the rain splattered the windows and the gales blew through the pines. And Gebler spoke of his present lonely existence.
“I go to sleep at dawn. And get up late to get through another day till that day is gone, like the next day and the next. And then suddenly you stop, look back. And realize that that was becoming the life you’ve lived.”
But Gebler was cheerful enough spending our evening in this homey family hotel, later renamed the La Touche, which had for Valerie and I become an oasis to repair to. Especially from the winter hardships of Kilcoole, when a shilling for a hot bath could replenish visions of hope, and then, over four o’clock tea in the hotel’s lounge, listen to the reassuring vowels of Greystones’ dowagers, among whom resided the mother of the author Samuel Beckett, literary news of whom in those days occasionally percolated from Paris to Dublin. There were also A. J. Cronin, the author, and his mother, and Father Jack Hanlon, the painter priest, and his mother. And indeed, before she bought her own house just down the road, there was my own mother, ascending and descending the stately mahogany staircase and who often stayed in this Edwardian building to be faithfully cosseted by the hotel’s management and dark-uniformed staff. The wine waiter kept her wines and helped organize, with specially printed menus, the small family birthday parties she gave. And perhaps encouraged by the grandness of my mother’s graciousness, there was even some effort to dance occasional attendance upon the bearded likes of me.
Gebler, even as I had now sold up, and perhaps out of his own recent is
olation and loneliness, continued to press me not to leave Ireland and especially not to go to America. He was a man made wise by having to grow up teaching himself to read and write. Then self-taught as an author, he’d done exactly as he’d long plotted and planned to do, and that was to write a best-selling book. Gebler sitting and spending hundreds of hours meticulously researching in the British Museum reading room library. A seat or two away had also sat another earnest gentleman, Karl Marx, who wrote Das Kapital. Finally Gebler’s book published in the United States swept all before it. And then Gebler would, more mournfully than cynically, pronounce upon what authors do who suddenly grow rich.
“Mike, they buy binoculars, shotguns, sports cars and fishing rods, and a big estate to use them on. And then outfitted in their new life, along with new bathrooms, wallpaper and brands of soap, they make a fatal mistake and change their women. To schemingly get toasted and roasted on glowing hot emotional coals, and subjected to a whole new set of tricks and treacheries. Which leaves that author spiritually disillusioned and minus his favorite household implements.”
Although Gebler and I agreed that women were essentially the same, we also agreed that American women were a distinctive brand all on their own. And that European men were more liable than an American to take them seriously. But one felt that Gebler was once upon a time spoiled. And regretting a woman he’d left or lost. For while he wrote The Plymouth Adventure down a front basement room in London’s Palace Gardens Terrace, and at dawn helped himself to milk to drink from neighboring porches, he had a faithful keeper and acolyte who did no man any wrong. I never met her. But about no woman have I ever heard such awed voices speak such universal praise. A Dublin girl and an accomplished actress on the Dublin stage, she seemed to be admired and loved by all. But about whom Gebler never uttered or spoke a single word. Her name was Sally Travers. Dead now. Yet one day, one knows, in her everlasting memory, will be written some amaranthine song, to be heard sung through the streets of Dublin. And one knows too that Gebler’s silence only meant that, as writers do, they do more deeply conceal all that they most deeply love.
Packed in a great box I had made in Dublin, my paintings were brought to Greystones train station. From where they would go south on that lonely rail track along the shore to Cork to await passage to New York on the ocean liner America. My last act decamping from Ireland was to drive my trusty sedan to the Watson and Johnson Garage at Greystones, where local folklore has it, its four-wheeled ghost has been seen passing driverless on these country lanes but with Behan sedately in the passenger seat. I said good-bye to my barber, Josey, who also cut my brother T.J.’s hair who had decamped from America to take up living in our mother’s house in Greystones. And Josey always could tell if Valerie was mucking about my own noncurly locks with a garden secateurs. However, when T.J. found out that Josey in his off hours tonsured the hair of the deceased, he supplied Josey with his own specially to be reserved implements delivered one day in their own embossed case.
“Now, Josey, you’re only to use these on me and not on any of your departed customers to spruce them up for the grave.”
I took my last ride on the train to Dublin along the precipitous cliffs overlooking the sea. And it was upon one such early journey that I composed the story “A Party on Saturday Afternoon.” Arriving at Westland Row Station, I went to have a coffee and spice bun with a butter ball at Bewley’s Oriental Cafe. Then exiting from the aroma of roasting coffee beans and ready to go to the airport to fly to the Isle of Man, who should I meet but Behan swaggering in his magnanimous way up Grafton Street. One first heard his loud shout, “Mike Donleavy, how’s your hammer hanging,” and then as he sidled up in his strangely indifferent way, he reported the very latest of latest news. That Crist, while in a restaurant in London and while dining waiting for a bus, suddenly saw the bus he had to catch unexpectedly pull up to the curb outside. Only halfway through his meal, Crist gathered up knife and fork and taking his plate of sausages, bacon and mash, popped some salt in a napkin and with a bottle of beer under his arm, rushed out the restaurant door and hopped aboard the bus, where he duly sat down and continued his meal. Behan commenting,
“Now, I’ll tell you one thing, Mike, Crist may have wanted bad enough to get where he wanted to go on this bus, but whatever else we may say or think about him, one thing is a certainty that he has as a human being demonstrated his great practicality.”
But later in the New World, America, I was to hear more of this story from Gainor’s own lips when we would go, as I insisted we did, in order to avoid mayhem and horror, to meet and talk in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City’s upper Bronx. In Ireland, while his wife, Constance, now matriculated at Trinity, Crist had, under the dire weight of insurmountable debts and the accumulation of personal misunderstandings, which in Crist’s parlance referred to bitter disputes, fled to England. But before he had done so he had taken up with an elegantly attractive fox-hunting university girl, Pamela O’Malley, from a family prominent in the southwest of Ireland, who, as a young woman of independent mind, was a rarity of the place and time, and who later became the second wife of this American man from Ohio. It was she who helped organize his life in London to be led as much as possible in a civilized manner, and saw to it that he kept appointments. And it was upon this day of taking his meal aboard the bus, that Crist had been on his way to visit his small daughter staying with relatives of his first wife. But upon arrival to see the little girl, a disagreement arose and Crist stormed off. Without a pub near at the time and another two hours to wait to catch another bus and in desperation to get away from it all, even if it was for only the briefest time, Gainor chose to go for a quiet walk in nearby Epping Forest.
“Mike, so much has gone wrong in my life that harassment and misunderstanding seems to accumulate and create about me. And the least little thing triggers off the horrors. The day I took my meal aboard the bus, I was at my wit’s end and hardly knew where to turn. And I especially needed a breather and to enjoy having the considerable pleasure of seeing my very pretty and delightful little daughter. But God knows, I am bedeviled by bad luck. Within five minutes of my arrival, one of those insoluble misunderstandings erupted with my in-laws, leaving me livid and with no alternative but to abandon seeing my daughter. With time to wait until I could escape from that godforsaken place back into the civilization of central London, I was certain to go out of my mind unless I had an unnervous break from my fast increasing heebie-jeebies, general angst, the jimjams and strain. I headed into the forest as being the nearest place where I was bound to find within nearly six thousand acres of natural woodland, and amid the hornbeam, beeches and ancient oak trees and in the sylvan and anonymous surrounds, at least a few minutes of desperately needed solace. I’d walked northward a mile and reached what must have been the center of the forest and without the sight of another human being, and began for the first time in months to feel a sense of calm. Then suddenly ahead through the shadows of trees, there was a welcoming sunlight pouring into a circular glade, an arena of tall grasses and the faded stalks of flowers through which went a path. And now within a few unbelievable seconds everything changed. I stepped out into the welcome warm rays of sunshine to walk to the other side of the glade. And as I did so, there came emerging from the opposite end of the path a solitary man. Mike, I deserve better luck. As this person approached and came near enough for one to recognize without my glasses, he was finally too near, and it was too late to politely detour rapidly from his presence and go elsewhere within this six thousand acres in which to roam. He was a man, a member of the Legion of Mary, who back in Dublin had in fact, one innocent Wednesday early afternoon come to knock on my door at 1 Newtown Avenue, Blackrock. And as it was raining and he was seeking my conversion to becoming a member of the Legion of Mary, I had asked him in. He sat on the couch and spent four hours of intense proselytization concerning the legion, its good works and good people, whereupon, having patiently listened without interruption I suggested we po
p just a few steps away for an interlude of a little refreshment. Mike, after the second pint and exposing him to my own interest in the theory I’d formulated concerning the true nature of existence and the possibility of energy emanating from the inertia of absolute indolence, I could not extract the man from my company. He clung to me like a desperate leech, and, in the next three weeks, having been seduced by a lady whose every curvature spelled trouble and who had given him his first ever blow job, he promptly gave up the Legion of Mary, deserted his wife and children and was fired from his job. However, even more embarrassing than having set him on the road to vegetative nirvana and what I did not conceive could be his ruin, the very last thing I did before finally extricating myself from his company was to borrow his very last five shillings. Which is still owed to him. Now both of us were so stunned by this hauntingly cosmically impossible confrontation that we passed each other silently by. I did, of course, reaching the safety of the trees on the other side, turn to peek back. And just in time to see this poor sod running away for all he was worth.”
And Mike
Let me tell you
It wasn’t long
Before my own legs
Broke
Into a sprint
11
WORD AROUND DUBLIN already had it that following Gainor Crist’s departure from his little house at 1 Newtown Avenue, Blackrock, that an occasional haunting humming could be heard of “Raggle Taggle Gypsy,” one of Gainor’s favorite songs. And that his ghost was seen entering O’Rourke‘s Pub just down the road and that the tap of the edge of a half a crown would sound on the bar to summon a pint and glass of Powers Gold Label. But Gainor was still very much alive despite his bizarre confrontation in Epping Forest. And was already toying with possible escape back to the good old U.S. of A. That place which we as Europeanized Americans assumed was always there to pick up the pieces of our lives which Europe might have sidetracked while we were at play there. That we could finally return to the New World, where hot showers would once again rain cleansing upon our heads and shoulders to rid of any old backward grime Europe had left upon our persons, and where we could exhibit our cultivated ways and step into such pursuits that befitted such dignity.