Ireland

  “Is he gone away too?”

  “They fall out every year.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “On the floor, I’d say.”

  Ronan went back and knocked again, louder.

  An upstairs window opened.

  “Hallo.” The hairy face appeared; the wary eyes looked down. “What’d you want?”

  “I was looking for—”

  “Hold on, I can’t hear you.” The face disappeared, and moments later the poet opened the front door; he swayed a little, in a gray suit jacket with the remains of a flower in the buttonhole, a long shirt, a blue tie, and socks; no trousers. He looked like a fugitive from a riot.

  “I was having a bit of a lie-down—come in, I’m a bit sleepy today.”

  “Ah’m—I was here once before.”

  The poet, his face red as a furnace, stared at Ronan.

  “You were, you were—with that fella, what was his name, he tells everybody he’s a great friend of mine, the teacher?”

  Suddenly Hanafin held out his hand. “I’m sorry for your trouble.”

  “How did you know?”

  “There was a man staying here who was at the funeral. Very sad he was, too, about it, very sad, decent man your father was, he said.”

  “Who was the man?”

  “He’s the man I told you about before. Him and his stories. He stays here, gives us great value.”

  “How long ago? Is he here now?”

  “No, no, hold your horses.” Hanafin saw the force of Ronan’s interest. “He’s gone outta here.”

  “Where?”

  Hanafin paused. “He’s not that well.”

  In the dim bar, he righted an overturned chair. Everything smelled musty; the poet poured himself a gigantic whiskey, cleaned a spoon on his shirttails, and began to stir the whiskey.

  Ronan had to ask, “Why are you stirring it?”

  “No apparent reason. D’you want the old guy for something?”

  “I do.”

  “And it’s nothing bad you want him for?”

  “Oh, Lord, no!”

  Hanafin drank deep. “I don’t like saying it, but you might have to hurry. I got the doctor for him. He had this bad wheezing—I s’pose the years on the road, and the damp and that.”

  “When did he go?”

  “What’ll you have?”

  “No, no drink, thanks.” Ronan almost shuddered.

  Hanafin eyed him. “You seem like you want him real bad?”

  “How long is it since he was here?”

  “Two months. More. Maybe three. Jan was here at the time, she’s’n’t here now.”

  Suddenly Hanafin began to sob. He put his head down on the bar and wept like a child.

  “We were at a wedding—and she went. That’s why she’s’n’t here now. I mean—she’s’n’t here at all. She’s gone, and she’ll maybe never come back, she might go off with some fella, it’d be like a death.”

  Ronan, untrained for such events, had no words. He wanted to say something, anything, but Hanafin prevented him with wilder crying.

  “It might be a fella I know. Would that be worse than if it was someone I didn’t know? Which is the worst, huh, what we know or what we don’t know? Look at us, you and me, and the things we know that we don’t want to know. There’s you and the sadness of your life and your father cold in the ground and your mother your aunt and your aunt in actual fact your mother and there’s me and I’ve no wife ’cause she’s’n’t here now. She’s’n’t here. Maybe she’ll never be here again.”

  Ronan looked at Hanafin, wild-eyed, hairy, tearstained Hanafin. In his mind, the words clanged like bolts in a metal tunnel—“and your father cold in the ground and your mother your aunt and your aunt in actual fact your mother and your father cold in the ground and your mother your aunt and your aunt in actual fact your mother and your father cold in the ground and your mother your aunt and your aunt in actual fact your mother…”

  He picked up his knapsack, felt the old bleak red colors descending, fought them off, and walked to the door.

  “Here, listen, have a drink for Jeezus’ sake, you’re lookin’ at a man whose own wife isn’t here, the least you can do is drink with him, don’t leave him on his own.”

  Outside, everything had turned to gray—gunmetal gray; father cold in the ground and your mother your aunt and your aunt in actual fact your mother; the clouds lowered but threatened no rain; father cold in the ground and your mother your aunt and your aunt in actual fact your mother; the house of the gossipy neighbor had no color of any kind except gray; your mother your aunt and your aunt in actual fact your mother; the universe had grown gray.

  Ronan put one foot in front of the other—at least, that was what it felt like. In his brain, tumblers kept clicking into place like the locks of a massive safe vault being opened—clunk, clunk, CLUNK! And he was wrong too about the sky threatening no rain; it swept in, a sneering, dense rain, swiping his face.

  He pushed up his parka hood up, and once more, as before in awful times, his mind raced with ridiculous, incongruous thoughts. I wish I had windshield wipers for my glasses. The hen must have died in the famine because nobody had enough strength to wring its neck. Barry Hanafin, under his long shirttails, has legs as young as a girl’s.

  Ronan headed east. The white stones at the edge of the Burren moonscape kept the light alive long enough to guide him to a village. No buses tonight, not coming through here, a woman said; wait until tomorrow. He nodded, numb as a stone. The lone pub also offered bed-and-breakfast—and an evening of music and song. He tried to eat the meal he had ordered, but the potatoes contained spring onions, the way his mother made them, and that shut off his escape. His mother? Alison? No, his aunt. No, that was Kate. Alison. Kate. Kate. Alison. Time after time he closed his eyes, desperation rising like a tide.

  Around nine o’clock a very old concertina player struck up, and then two fiddlers joined in, one of them a seven-year-old girl. Ronan watched them, envying the child her talent, wondering if he could ever reach such a visible plateau in any skill. She had dark curly hair, intense concentration, and her fingers moved faster than he could see.

  After the third tune, two couples, deep in middle age, swept to the floor and began to dance. They also concentrated hard, and he watched their feet—more delicate, he thought, than their faces. Nausea began to curdle in him, and he felt sweat trickle down under his arms.

  At his shoulder, a girl in her late twenties said, “C’mon. C’m’out here,” took his arm, and steered him onto the dance floor.

  He did not resist, and he looked as ungainly as he felt; but nobody laughed or mocked as she began to teach the rudiments.

  “You’re in Clare, so this dance is a Clare Set, and you can follow me, I mean your feet can do what my feet are doing, look down until your feet can do it by themselves.”

  It took some moments; he could not seem to push the rhythms he felt in his body through his ankles into his feet.

  “Give yourself time, don’t rush at it.” The music stopped. “We’ll hold on here for the next one.” She held his hand in her warm dry fingers. “I’m Lelia.”

  “You’re doing grand,” said one of the women dancers to Ronan. And, “God, Lelia, you always had an eye for the Yanks.”

  “He’s not a Yank, are you?”

  Ronan said, “No.”

  “You’re too silent for a Yank, aren’t you?”

  The music started again, and this time Ronan moved easier. Other couples came onto the floor, but nobody bumped, such was their gracefulness. He had never been in a milieu like this; he had a vague knowledge that music got played in pubs, but the life at home and then in Dublin had been almost monastically enclosed. Now he thought he knew why he had been so protected; Alison, Kate, even his father—they were also protecting themselves.

  “You enjoying yourself?” asked Lelia.

  Ronan nodded, afraid to look in her eyes.

  “You’ve’n’t said a
syllable. What you doing here, anyway?”

  “I’m—sort of going on somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Can we stop dancing and talk?”

  “You’re direct anyway,” said Lelia, but not unkindly.

  They went to a quiet end of the bar. Lelia looked at him; “No. Come on outside. That’s not good sweat that you’re sweating.”

  In the open air she made him lean against the wall and said, “Now—ease yourself.”

  “Ah’m—listen—”

  “Stop for a while, will you? Cool yourself down.”

  “But I’ve just had very bad news.”

  “What’s the good news inside it? There’s always good news wrapped up in bad news.”

  “Jesus God, I don’t know.”

  “But there is.”

  “That’s ludicrously optimistic.”

  Lelia said, “You’ll have to use smaller words, you’re in Clare now.”

  Ronan wanted to laugh but could not.

  “C’mere,” she said. “You’ve a nice hand, give it to me.”

  She took his unproffered hand and warmed it with her own two hands.

  “Are you dying of anything—anything urgent, I mean?”

  Ronan shook his head.

  “Is anybody who matters to you dying of anything urgent?”

  “No.”

  “If you’re not dying of anything urgent and if anybody who matters to you isn’t dying of anything urgent—that’s good news. Now—close your eyes and stand still and you’ll be all right.”

  Two days later, in the early morning, he stood outside the apartment in Dublin. He had traveled rough, by bus, on foot, by night train, his heart in his hands, through swinging moods of calming and raging, easing and fretting, sinking and elation. No sign of life; the curtains had not been drawn closed in any of the rooms for the previous night, and Kate always closed all curtains; the air seemed cold.

  A milkman came by—Ronan knew him, a bandy-legged, cold little man.

  “Are youse signing on again? We’ve stopped doing eggs.”

  “I don’t know, I mean about signing on.”

  The milkman looked at him oddly. “Weren’t youse away in England or sump’n?”

  “When did she cancel?”

  “It’d be four or five months ago, last March, I’d say, from memory, I’d hafta look it up in the ledger, like. I hear there’s new people coming in next week. Did youse not pay your rent or sump’n?”

  On Earlsfort Terrace he hesitated; to focus his mind, he counted the steps up to the main door but stopped after ten. A secretary whom he recognized passed by, and he followed her.

  “Professor Ryle—is he away?”

  “How could he be, and he doing the summer school?”

  “Ah.”

  Inside, he checked the summer school notices on “Victorian Ireland”; later that day the schedule would include “Charles Stewart Parnell. Lecturer, T. Bartlett Ryle.”

  Two hours later he slipped into the back of the packed, all-adult summer school in his old lecture theater.

  LET ME ASSUME THERE ARE MARTIANS AMONG you who have never heard of Parnell or the Land War in Ireland or Irish republicanism or Kitty O’Shea or any of the whole damn boiling.

  And why should you have? Many of you have come here from overseas and the only thing you know about Ireland is that we have ugly little men here, tricky fellows in green hats, who’ll look you in the eye and promise you a crock of gold. But then, when your glance is distracted even for a second, they vanish and take the gold with them.

  Yes, we do have such figures here—I can show you several. We call them “elected politicians.”

  Or you might have heard that our horses are fast and our women are beautiful. Or have I got that the wrong way round?

  And someone may have told you that this Irish Republic of nineteen-sixty-one is a land of tolerance and peace. It is indeed—we’re tolerant people. Tolerant provided you’re not a Jew—or “Jew-boy,” as we prefer to say—who wants to play golf, in which case you had better found your own golf club. And we’re peaceful, unless you happen to be a harmless Protestant farming land along the Irish border, in which case you might just get yourself shot in the head on your way to the creamery for no better reason than the little church you worship in or the fact that your wife had a second cousin who joined the British army.

  But we’re here to discuss Victorian Ireland, and my role today is to tell you about a man called Charles Stewart Parnell, born eighteen-forty-six, died eighteen-ninety-one, and if you go to the top of O’Connell Street, Dublin’s grandest thoroughfare, you will see his words stamped on the obelisk there: “No man shall have the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.” We could debate that for a while, but we won’t, not today anyway.

  Let me start you with a thumbnail sketch of Parnell. He was a tall, bearded man with a passion to get justice for the ordinary people of Ireland—of whom he was not one, he was privileged, a wealthy landlord. He rose to power in the second half of the nineteenth century and damn near got Ireland the right to govern itself and then lost it all for fancying a married woman. Of all the characters across the landscape of Irish history, he is one of the most interesting—powerful enough to arrest the rolling machinery of a great empire, and weak enough to be brought down by wearing his heart too low down on his body.

  No wonder he became a huge mythical figure, because in Ireland all politics is myth anyway. And so prevailing was the Parnell myth, which is the same as the Parnell reality, that there are people alive today who, if you pinched them hard, would weep salt tears for him.

  But that’s a feeling I loathe. Forget the popular Parnell you may have heard of—the man who let his heart rule his head; the man who chose the love of a woman over personal glory; “the Uncrowned King of Ireland.” Forget that. Cast aside the sickly nineteenth-century sentimentality that mourns “the Lost Leader.” Drop the pity for a man more sinned against than sinning, ruined by a sidelong glance from a beautiful siren.

  God, can’t you hear the heartstrings and the ballads! Bypass those who linger on the what-might-have-been. Instead shine a different light, and under it, what you see is different, and in fact, I believe a more admirable and significant Parnell emerges.

  There are three essentials in politics: getting power, using it, and keeping it. Parnell cleared the first hurdle in style. In the wake of the Great Potato Famine, he had grasped that a people treated too badly is the beginnings of a power base. He understood the anger that the Irish people felt at not having enough resources to keep themselves alive, and at the pisspoor efforts of the rich Protestants and the English government to ease the worst of the famine.

  Second, he used power well—his associations with the newly formed Land Leaguers gave him a base that also roped in the people who underpinned a newfound republican movement, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and that would eventually lead to the armed Irish Republican Army. In fact, you can point to Parnell’s moment as the time when it became likely that the desire to own their land again would put bullets in Irish guns—although he had nothing to do with that. But as to keeping power—that’s where he goes Greek on us, by which reference I mean tragedy.

  Parnell was born at the height of the famine, in eighteen-forty-six. His father owned land in county Wicklow, a house called Avondale, and the children of Ireland, God help them, have grown up listening to a mournful old song—“Oh have you been to Avondale and lingered in her lovely vale. Where tall trees whisper low the tale of Avondale’s proud eagle. Where pride and ancient glory fade; such was the land where he was laid; like Christ was thirty pieces paid for Avondale’s proud eagle.”

  Give me a head start myself and a strong following wind, and I’d sing it for you, but I’d have to have vessels of a certain liquor line up in front of me. And I’d drink them fast, because I’d regret singing it—that song contains exactly the kind of maudlin expressions that obscured Parnell’s importance.

&nb
sp; His motive forces are much more interesting than any public reaction to him. Parnell’s mother was an American, and twenty years after the famine she had a good sense that if anything in Ireland was to change politically, the power for it would come from the States.

  Why? Because half of Ireland was over there, escaping from the Famine or, earlier than that, because they had no place else to go once their lands—and their language and their religion and their dignity—were taken from them. If they survived the journeys in the coffin ships, they got their snouts in the great gold trough of America, and some would say their snouts are in there still.

  Twenty years makes a generation, and by the time the children of those coffin-ship emigrants grew up, they had imbibed a hatred of England with their mother’s milk. They were looking day and night for ways to pay back the English—who by then owned, it is said, in excess of eighty-five percent of the surface of Ireland, although I myself believe that figure somewhat unreliable; it might have been higher, it might have been lower—the measuring devices were unsophisticated and subject to the alterations of vested interests.

  The timing of Parnell’s arrival on the political scene is no accident and should be no surprise. No accident because conditions already existed for such a figure; even though England governed Ireland absolutely, Irish affairs were now represented by Irish-elected members to the English Parliament in London. It was our foot in the door since before Daniel O’Connell’s time. And at the age of twenty-nine, Parnell got himself elected as a member of Parliament for Meath.

  As to this being no surprise, the precedent also existed for a big, flamboyant man speaking Irish concerns to the heart of the British Empire and tweaking their noses. Daniel O’Connell rightly gets a lot of praise for having freed Ireland from the Penal Laws that hammered Catholics and for campaigning for Irish self-determination. He should be praised more, though, for paving the way. If there hadn’t been an O’Connell, I wonder if there would have been a Parnell; O’Connell demonstrated that there was a place for a powerful, distinguished Irishman in the politics of England, and he had proven that such a figure could make a mark.