But how would I sustain the effort? I have a fear of boredom and therefore, in this charting of my life, I soon knew that I must write about matters other than myself. To avoid impatience with the little details of my own days, I would need a device. Happily, I had one at hand.
I could see from the politics of Ireland that I stood on the lid of a boiling pot—all politics stem from anger at something or other. And since my own life had now been set ablaze with unfulfilled passion, the fever in my country, it seemed, echoed the fever in my heart. In short, I would write a History of my country in my lifetime and it would also be a History of my life.
How different it could be, I thought. I have had the good fortune to see Ireland at first hand, often in most intimate circumstances, because I commenced my adult life as a Traveling Healer. Up and down Ireland I visited the ailing in their homes. Castle or cottage, I cured them—or tried to. With drinks and poultices made from the herbs of the countryside, plucked from the hedgerows and sometimes mixed with secret mineral powders, I was often able to make people better in their health; I brought about recovery. As a consequence they loved me, they welcomed me back into their houses, they celebrated me—and they gave me their confidences.
Next I acquired another means of intimate access to my country's people. Although I am neither trained historian nor scholar, I have always gathered people's tales and I have always enjoyed meeting figures of interest and significance. Thus, while healing the sick, I also worked as a Traveling Correspondent. I was retained permanently by no one periodical; rather, I gathered impressions—of peoples, places, occurrences—and put them together and submitted them.
Many of my accounts and essays appeared in distinguished journals and newspapers, notably the Vindicator, and I was much fulfilled by that. Consequently, I was granted access to anybody whom I chose to meet; I am still astonished by the zeal with which people want to see their names in printed pages. Thus my twin professions of healer and scribe opened many doors. I felt confident that the narrations I derived from such a life would stand one day as a modest achievement, a small personal History of Ireland during my lifetime—a life of love and pain and loss and trouble and delight and knowledge.
A portrait in oils of the woman with whom Charles O'Brien fell in love hangs in Trinity College, Dublin. It was painted by Sir William Orpen, a distinguished Anglo-Irish artist of the Edwardians. Orpen saw a very beautiful thirty-year-old woman of determined character. Her heavy and shiny fair hair has been cut to neck length. Orpen painted her mouth in a straight line, and her brown eyes looked directly at him.
He seated her in a chair covered with gold velvet, and she is wearing a plain, rich, cream dress, like the wife of a Roman senator; there's some beading at the boat-shaped neck. Her hands clutch the arms of the chair; she wears many rings; her shoes are simple, strong, and black.
The little brass plaque on the gilt frame beneath the canvas reads, “April Somerville, London 1912”—and that is why the painting proved so hard to trace. Mr. O'Brien met her as “April Burke,” in Paris, in 1900, when she was eighteen.
She had an unusual personality. When he met her, he saw initially a young woman who detonated charges within him. That ignition evidently happened at first sight, a fact remarkable in itself but not all that unusual in the often powerfully volatile psyche of the adventurous and energetic nineteenth-century man.
What he could not have seen at that moment—but would soon begin to observe and report—was the tail of the comet. Behind this young woman trailed a legend of intrigue; it included the sulfurous whiff of blackmail, heart-cutting tragedy, plus an old scandal at whose core lay a mystery. And she also brought danger and actual harm to those who loved her.
Throughout his “History,” however, Mr. O'Brien never casts her in that light. Always and ever she is his great love, and while those around him gasped at her behavior, he never judged her anything but wonderful.
Charles O'Brien lived in a culture of narrative. The Irish people of his era, with, as yet, scant literature to hand, told the world in stories. Naturally, therefore, he begins at the beginning—of his own existence, with his first memories. As he embarks upon his journey to “improve” himself, his “History” also supplies a portrait of life in a well-to-do Irish rural family of the mid-nineteenth century.
The names of my parents are as follows: Bernard Michael O'Brien, from the county Tipperary, and the former Amelia Charlotte Goldsmith, from the county Roscommon; he a Catholic, she what they mistakenly call “Protestant.” The term should technically refer only to the Reformed churches who protested Rome as Luther did. In Ireland, it applies to every person not a Catholic, and therefore my mother, an Irish Anglican or Irish Episcopalian, a member of the Church of Ireland, is counted Protestant.
My parents thus entered what is said to be “a mixed marriage.” Father came from the ancient Irish native roots that went into this ground once the Great Ice Age melted, ten thousand years ago; and Mother sprang from the English “strangers” who have long ruled this island. Our branch of the O'Brien tribe or clan managed to hold on to their land down the oppressed and confiscating centuries. Mother's antecedents, of the same stripe as those oppressors and confiscators, came into Ireland around 1590 and were given many, many acres in reward for their military support in the great English attempt to eradicate the Irish people. She therefore qualifies as “Anglo-Irish.”
Let me define the nomenclature once and for all. The Anglo-Irish comprise that peculiar breed of people of English ancestry who settled in Ireland on land that was taken by force from the native Irish. By virtue of having been planted in their new acres militarily, they became economically superior to the natives—a superiority they also assumed to be social; and they spoke a different language (the Queen's English). Soon they had so thoroughly merged with their new land as to be neither English nor Irish. Many of them—in fact, most—fell passionately in love with the country that they were given; they became infected with its imagination, and they made significant contributions to it. Many others behaved like ignorant, bullying savages.
Whether I am Irish or Anglo-Irish I do not know; I fit the hat to the moment, and as a consequence both peoples greet me as their own. With the grandees in their limestone mansions and their vividly painted walls and their great furnishings and objets d'art I have an easy familiarity. But with the native-born folk in the cottages and small farms and their wonderful spirit, their music, their passion, their stories in their dense, ringing accents—with them I am alive to the quick.
To keep this adroit balance going, to broaden the tightrope a little under my feet, I—almost militantly—do not practice any religion, although I was tutored as a Catholic and can spout the liturgy with the best of priests.
My family lived in a house on a wooded hill in County Tipperary. I was born there, on the twenty-first day of June 1860, not far from Cashel, which is a landlocked and fertile town, a fortress of Ireland's faith in medieval times. At my conception some wonderful spiritual exchange must have happened between my father and my mother, because my chief asset is, I believe, a notable zest, an exuberant, rich energy for all the excellent things that Life can bring.
I love wines, I play a smooth hand at cards, and such horses as I have wagered upon have almost won a number of races. Travel delights me, the opportunity to look upon other faces in other circumstances. I enjoy good company with many tales told, and I have been given to understand that my gifts as a raconteur stand up well.
Excitement has come to me often, and its glories make me impatient with those who have not understood it, who have often used words such as “reckless” and “feckless” when they speak of me to others. (This being Ireland, I hear such remarks not long after they are uttered—even if they were spoken at the opposite end of the country.)
Some parental characteristics have landed upon me. My father too had hair the color of hay; now his head resembles an egg; and my mother has grave, gray eyes that lit up when she and my f
ather engaged in one of their jostling talks.
“Amelia, your eyes rob me of my arguments,” he would say, and he'd touch her cheeks with those huge hands of his, which I have inherited. (Many ladies have spoken to me of my own gray eyes, and I have my mother's laugh-crinkles.)
Neither parent had the blessing of excellent teeth; nor have I. My father long thought about acquiring false teeth, of the kind sported by his friend the Bishop of Cloyne, who drank much port—but that gentleman had to learn to smile with his lips closed. I have a pair of feet that seem to go out of true too easily; my toes look like small hammers and cannot be as prehensile as I would wish. And I am a creature built for pleasure, I think, in the general arena between my upper and lower extremities.
As to my appearance, people in general often remarked my wild mop of yellow-blond hair, and my height of six feet three inches, and my wide shoulders. Not that I am perfect; I have a small birthmark on my right hip, which, I have been told, looks like a dragonfly. Mother has assured me that it manifested itself at my arrival into the world and she interpreted it as a sign of good luck, of which the dragonfly has always been an omen.
My father talked all the time, as though he feared silence and what it might bring in on its quiet wings. He talked for the sake of talking, for the sound of words. In his head he carried much knowledge, and when he required to know something that he did not already know, he in-vented it. Very early in my life I heard him call out the Seven Wonders of the World—and I heard them many times more.
“Let us always be alphabetical where we can,” he would begin. “It preserves order.” And off he would go: “The Lighthouse of Alexandria. The Temple of Artemis. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Pyramids of Giza. The Tomb of Halicarnassus. The Statue of Zeus. The Colossus of Rhodes.” As many times as I heard it I would puzzle at his system of alphabetization—and then he would launch into his next list, “The Seven Wonders of Tipperary”: “The Rock of Cashel. The Devil's Bit. The Weir at Golden. Tipperary Castle. The Shores of Lough Derg. The Glen of Aherlow. Kitty Cahill's legs.”
By Father's side I saw these local marvels—all but one; the legs depended from a lady whom I never met, and whose character my mother disparaged. Memories of our other county “wonders” have constantly delighted my mind, and one of them, Tipperary Castle, came to dominate my existence. I am most pleased, however, by the fact that I learned of them through my father; their flavors and moods count among the many gifts he gave me.
Here is a small tale of my father: As a young man he delighted in practical jokes until he found them too cruel; however, the memory of a certain escapade still tickles him. In the village nearby lived a solitary and very cranky little gentleman, who barked at one and all. He had an Achilles' heel, though, and the local boys, including Father, soon discovered this vulnerability. The little gentleman, when wages had been paid on a Saturday, tackled his pony to its cart, set off to the next village, and in the hostelry there imbibed until midnight. Then, drunk to insensibility almost, he came out, mounted the cart, said “Hup” to the pony, who then trotted him home, and the little gentleman fell asleep on the cart.
One summer night, the local boys waited until the pony drew to a halt outside the little gentleman's door—which, in common with all our houses, was never locked. They gently took the sleeping man from the cart and carried him indoors. Next they untackled the pony and led it into the house. Now they loosed the cotter pins in the axles and removed the cart's wheels. They reassembled the cart inside the house, tackled the pony to it again, placed the little gentleman—still snoring—back on the cart, and tiptoed away, closing the door behind them.
In the morning, of course, the little gentleman awoke and found himself inside his own house, on a cart that could not possibly have fitted through his door—or so all logic told him!
I have heard of that jape being practiced elsewhere in Ireland, but my father swore that he was the sole inventor.
Mother was and remains a lady, by birth and by nature. She placed great value upon social grace (which my father, she said, possessed naturally). From her I learned never to keep my hands in my pockets in the presence of a lady. Mother also taught me that “a gentleman should contribute something of his own to every conversation.”
She spoke candidly about things that fascinated me. My birth, she said, was headlong and energetic; the midwife exclaimed, “Look! He can't wait to get into the world.” I was born at half past eleven on a Thursday, and it being in Ireland and therefore half an hour west and behind Greenwich Mean Time, the true moment of my birth might be accurately categorized as noon on Midsummer's Day.
“No more fortunate day,” Mother claimed, and my father said that it was lucky I came out at all; I might “just as easily have decided to stay in there, a grand comfortable place like that.”
Mother described my birth as “a delight” and was always ready to tell me how she had counted my fingers and my toes. “And I went to count your teeth,” said my father. “Like I'd do to a foal. But you didn't have any”—and he laughed. She did not employ a nurse to feed me and did not, as my father had recommended, drink any liquor during my time at her breast. He said that was a pity, because he wished me “to get used to the taste—save a lot of time later on.” In that month, among our neighbors, I was the only one of five newborn infants to survive, a proportion slightly greater than was usual.
However, neither parent had told me the full truth of my birth, which I discovered only many years later. My mother had had severe illness and frailty all through her confinement and, more dangerous still, my birth came a margin early. On that midsummer morning, a frightful thunder-storm broke out as my father set out to fetch doctor and midwife. He needed the carriage for their transport, and as he crossed the river bridge a mile from our home, lightning, attracted by the water, struck one of the horse's harness-pieces. The animal reared in fright and swung so violently that he dashed the wheel of the carriage against the pediment of the bridge and broke the red spokes. (Once, I was comforted and pleased to learn that very similar circumstances had attended the birth in Italy of Michelangelo.)
My father untackled the stamping, frightened horse, calmed it, mounted it, and rode on to fetch the midwife, a woman almost too heavy for walking. I understand that she clung to my father on the back of the horse so closely that he said afterward he had not been so intimate with a midwife since the day he was born.
Once I had come into the world—and both parents have said this of me—I showed no signs of ever wanting to leave it. My infancy grew more and more robust and I proved inquisitive and mellow, no trouble to my parents or their helpers. As a small child I developed a personality so clearly defined that I was soon known by name to the adults of the locality. Our workers (my father prohibited the use of the word “servant”) became my companions, and I was set, it seemed, for a regular life as my father's successor on the farm. But the world's circle did not turn that way.
Life in Mr. O'Brien's surrounding environment was desperately poor. Existence for most Irish people was at that time brutish and unjust. But nothing else has greatly changed in the young Charles O'Brien's neighborhood. All the “wonders” of his father's Tipperary recital still exist (except, of course, the renowned limbs of the vaunted Miss Cahill).
The Rock of Cashel sits like a Disney creation high on a limestone crag over a wide and handsome plain, watched over by the gap-toothed Devil's Bit Mountain. Near Golden, four miles west, the river Suir (pronounced “Shure”) still flows over a shallow and placid weir. The shores of Lough Derg, in the northwest of the county, give Tipperary its border along the river Shannon. And the Glen of Aherlow, it is said, contains more sunlight and shadow than any other valley in Ireland.
As to the remaining “wonder,” the magnificent Tipperary Castle— Mr. O'Brien has no doubts as to its place in his narrative; when he remarked that it “came to dominate my existence,” he understated.
Even though he begins his recital of himself with the
memory of the violent Treece eviction, it makes sense to take as a truer starting point his view of himself at the age of forty. After all, that was when he met his motivation for writing, April Burke. Therefore his physical description probably shows us what she saw: a “wild mop of yellow-blond hair, and my height of six feet three inches, and my wide shoulders”—and his tone suggests a man looking in a mirror in the prime of his life.
To touch his “History” is to bring him closer than that. His papers convey a feeling far above the inanimate; they stack so pleasantly in the hand. He chose almost the texture of a linen weave, slightly heavier than the commercial writing foolscap of the day. The pages have colored gently with age.
He used a light sepia ink, close to a coffee color, and a medium-broad nib. Unlike most manuscripts of the day, his shows none of the tiny spatters at, say, the beginnings of sentences or paragraphs. Then there is the numbering of the pages—in the top right-hand corner he placed neat figures, each succeeded by a firm dot or full point. The entire script runs so smoothly, so uninterruptedly, that it proves impossible to say where he left off one day's work and began the next.
This orderliness of penmanship contradicts the “feckless” opinions of him that he himself openly reports. In later pages we infer, and encounter directly, a man seen by others as somewhat wayward and unsteady. Yet the management of his manuscript shows a figure in charge of what he was doing. There are perhaps no more than twenty small corrections in a handwritten document of several hundred pages.
As to content, although he seems conscious of the need for faithful chronology, he does not conform to the disciplines of academic historical narrative. He shuttles back and forth all the time, plucking an anecdote from his childhood here, a chance encounter with a great person there, a public incident somewhere else. Yet he always keeps hold of the thread of his history. He's like a man from a myth, drawing himself along a golden rope—not to immortality, but to the moment he eagerly wants to reach.