It was ridiculous but, against all the odds, I had one of the most beautiful walks of my life on that occasion, just taking off and rambling across the fields.
It was fantastic out by the reservoir, gathering your thoughts as the wind blew softly, as though it were ancient and had been doing it for ever. And which made me sad. Feeling sorry not just for Bone-head but for poor old Connolly too — who just didn’t get the plot, really, when you thought about it — and writing in my diary when I woke up the next day: ‘Knowledge is power and Connolly is powerless’, which was sad, for who wanted to write those words? Not me, but they were what I believed, and if that was the choice I’d made, your roads diverge and there is nothing you can do.
The Arrival of Johnston farrall!
(This appears on a page all by itself lovingly crafted in an absurdly baroque calligraphy totally at odds with the rest of the account, which is scattered over any number of loose-leaf pages.)
The Story of Johnston
When I saw the notice advertising the creative writing classes in the window of the Scotsfield Hotel, a couple of months after the row with Connolly, the last thing I thought was: ‘This is something that is destined to change my life.’ But that was exactly what happened, for in some ways Johnston was, when it came to creative things and attitude, not in his way all that different from Bono. For a start he looked cool, although he worked in the bank — he had just been posted from Dublin — with this fancy embroidered paisley-style waistcoat and his shoulder bag stuffed with books and papers. It was as though he wasn’t just a writer, but, if he’d wanted, could have made a very good sort of ‘up-to-the-minute’ psychologist as well. Just considering things patiently as he listened to your story and said: ‘No! No, please go on!’ whenever you became self-conscious. But also being able to encourage you when you felt like giving the whole thing up. There were people there who, if it had been anyone else who was running the show — ‘The Moderator’, he called himself — would hardly have lasted a week. Somehow he got around them and coaxed them back in. ‘You must remember to relax and let the creative juices flow,’ was one of the things he liked to say. Another one was: ‘Fuck syntax and spelling! It’s what you’ve got to say that’s important! That’s all I want to hear!’
And, boy, did he want to do that! Sometimes we’d be there until midnight in the back room of the pub, just reading our poems and scratching out stories, then off to his house to drink vodka and beer! You want to see the amount of books he had there, and I’d thought I had books. It could be difficult at times, though, it’s true. Because when you’d come back to the caravan, loaded up with booze, what you’d think was: ‘No, Bonehead is right! I’m fooling myself reading all these old books! There’s only one writer in Scotsfield and it fucking well’s not Joey Tallon!’
Then, at the next session, Johnston would say: ‘Everyone’s a writer, Joey! I’m telling you, you can do it!’ and then what would happen? Off you’d go again, thinking you were Shakespeare and Milton all rolled up in one, with a dash of James Joyce thrown in for good measure. Speaking of which, sometimes Johnston wore a flower in his buttonhole, which didn’t please some people at all. Coming out of the hotel after a class one night, I overheard Austie saying: ‘Look at the cunt! I’ll kick his “truth” down his throat! Him and his fucking flowers!’
But Johnston didn’t care — just strolled off down the street, with his head in the air as if to say: ‘Now don’t disturb me! Can’t you see I’m otherwise occupied with the creation of a masterpiece?’
Which was the great thing about the country generally now, and you only had to look at people to notice it. Gone were the days when everybody had their head down saying: ‘Not only am I not engaged in the creation of a masterpiece but the likes of me — why, it is only with the greatest of difficulty I can tie my own shoelaces I’m such a near-simpleton!’
Even old Boo Boo had turned around and learnt some fabulous new tricks, having come through the wars and now well established as one of the most promising record producers in Dublin. I met him one day on a flying visit from the city and he told me he’d introduce me to Bono some time. ‘I really liked his music in prison,’ I told him. I hated that word ‘prison’. Even with someone like Boo Boo it made me kind of sick to say it.
‘It healed me, I think. It was a real big help.’
‘Whenever you’re up, give me a call and the three of us will go out for some beers.’
‘Did you ever hear of Thomas Merton?’ I asked him, but he shook his head.
‘I read all about him in the library. I saw in the paper that Bono likes him. So does Merv, incidentally,’ I added.
‘Ciao,’ said Boo Boo, ‘I’ll check him out,’ and drove off in this big flash motor — an Alfa Romeo, I think it’s called.
I couldn’t believe it when Johnston Farrell told me that he’d gone to school with him — Bono, I mean. I nearly fainted when he said it so casually.
‘I just can’t believe what is happening,’ I said.
‘Tell me your plans for your story, Joey,’ he’d say, ‘The Story of Me, as I’ve heard you calling it,’ and we’d head off down to Austie’s, as everybody still called it, swanky cocktail bar or not.
At first I was a little bit hesitant, but gradually I began to open up. He told me he thought it might make a great treatment for a film. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but over the next few weeks he explained. He used to take notes himself, just jotting down bits as I was speaking. After a few jars, of course, it’d be hard to shut me up, especially when I’d start thinking about Jacy. I’d see all these things that I used to see when I thought about her — the interstate and Iowa and shit — and it would get me all choked up. But Johnston was canny — he’d just look away when he saw me get like that, and when it had passed he’d turn back. You would have trusted him with your life, that Johnston Farrell.
Only for him, I don’t think I’d ever have found the courage to face the truth about Mona and admit that I’d lied about her. I thank him for that as well. And for explaining to me also that in a way what I’d said about her wasn’t lying. Because, for me, in a special way she lived all right.
He said she was like someone from a favourite book you can almost feel walking beside you. What he called: ‘An exceptionally well-drawn character, fleshed out with convincing detail.’
He had just happened to say it one night in Austie’s and I took it down. Another thing he said was that maybe I should consider calling it Siege!, but I didn’t agree because I didn’t think the story was really about that. It was more, I felt, about feeling, and what people are like deep down inside. What their dreams are. How they might journey towards peace. Find a peaceful place they could call their home. At first he didn’t quite understand, he said, but when I gave him my diary from around that time (the ‘Total Organization’ ledger, in fact), he said things were becoming much clearer. He said that he found a lot of it funny — things like the idea of Fr Connolly singing ‘Peace Frog’, say, which had completely slipped my mind. It was that night, just as we were leaving, that he happened to mention that Bono and him had gone to the same school. Not making a big deal about it the way I might have done! Telling everybody you met, like an eejit!
No, just saying it matter-of-fact. Like it didn’t cost him a thought. Which was the way things should be and the way Bono would have liked it himself. He had said it in the papers. ‘I’m just a regular guy.’ The same as Johnston, the same as myself. Just regular guys in search of the truth. Fighting the good fight, as Johnston would say. His favourite writers were Gogol and Eliot. I couldn’t believe it when he said that. ‘Mine too, Johnston!’ I said. ‘Even though I don’t understand it all!’ Meaning Eliot. I knew about Gogol after reading him in the library. What a headcase! Noses in bread rolls!
‘That doesn’t matter,’ he told me, ‘as long as you hear the beat of its heart.’
He really could catch it in one, Johnston. I used to sit for hours by the window of the cara
van wondering how he did that. Then I’d take down Gogol or Eliot and write like a maniac in the same way they did. I used to take Dead Souls out to the reservoir and read it there for hours listening to the wind bringing voices from the clouds. At the end of the book the character wanted to build a Temple of Colossal Dreams. I thought that was a fantastic phrase — and a fantastic thing to want to do. I couldn’t stop thinking of it rising up there out of the trees, with these great big marble pillars with vines and greenery all around. I wasn’t sure what the temple meant, to Gogol at least, but to me it meant a new beginning. A new spring was what it meant. That the past was over and all the old winters were dead, with the freshest of warm breezes blowing in a world no longer knowing deceit or duplicity or guile. Now that anything is possible, I’d think as I closed that book, what you once dreamed, now you can do! Because you know it can happen!
‘It can!’ I said to the utterly silent water. ‘It can!’
Which was why when I got home I dashed off a few words to Bono, telling him about Johnston and how we’d happened to meet up and shit and how much his music had meant to me at a particular time in my life. I didn’t want to use the word ‘prison’. I couldn’t believe it when I received a reply hardly three fucking days later! All I could think of was how the world had changed. It was almost like the temple had been built already and there was no need to go to the bother of doing it. On top of that, Johnston Farrell kept phoning — to invite me out to dinner, no less!
He was fascinated by my story, he told me, especially what with its being set in the early seventies. Which he’d read about but didn’t know. Well, of course he didn’t — I mean, back then Johnston Farrell would have been but a child!
This is fantastic! I thought as I rabbited on like a youngster myself. I couldn’t believe that it sounded so interesting to him. But it did, you could tell just by his expression. Not to mention his notes! Jesus! He had even more than me! The big difference, of course, that his weren’t written by a semi-literate gobshite! No, I don’t mean that. That’s just me being stupid. Once upon a time I would have meant it. But not now. Not since he’d educated me. And Mervin. And, through his music, the man who had written The Joshua Tree, along with his mates Larry, Adam and a fabulous virtuoso called ‘The Edge’.
Letter
I really treasured the letter from Bono but I didn’t want to show it to Johnston in case he thought it a bit kind of … I don’t know — silly. ‘You don’t carry it everywhere with you, do you?’ I could hear him saying. Which out of embarrassment — the new spring hadn’t entirely arrived — I knew I would deny. But I did. I did carry it everywhere, all creased up in the back pocket of my jeans. It was covered in Guinness rings and cigarette burns and had lots of little notes in the margins. There were even a few little astrological doodles on it. I read it again:
Principle Management
c/o Windmill Lane Studios
Litton Lane
Dublin
Dear Mr Tallon
Thank you for your letter which we have noted and kept on file. Unfortunately Bono and the boys are in Miami recording at the moment and won’t be back until late June. I will pass on your ideas to them and will be in touch.
Yours etc.
June Enright
The thing I was really looking forward to talking to Bono about was how you — anyone — can do anything if they truly believe in it. It is, in a way, the happy marriage of considering and doing. You think and you act. You think and you do. You … go for it! That was what the journey was. That was what it was all about. I believed that now. What I couldn’t believe more than anything was that I was just going to stroll in and meet Bono, one of the most famous rock singers in the world, and it wasn’t going to cost either of us a thought. Which was why I sat down with the guitar and strummed a few simple chords. Simple because that was how the new spring seemed. That it all had happened so effortlessly, and without any mystical old bullshit. As soon as I had the song finished I was on the verge of going up to the library and taking out Siddhartha with the sole intention of putting a macth to it. Or tearing all the pages out of Steppenwolf. But then I thought, No, that would be stupid. For the past is the past and the present is the present. The new spring is the old winter’s son. When I thought that, I reckoned it wasn’t bad. Not as good as Johnston, maybe, but not exactly a pile of horse cack either.
Then I took the guitar and went out to the reservoir. It was particularly beautiful there in the dawn. After I’d played my song, I recited a few words from Gogol. The dew was on the grass and the leaves were beginning to whisper. I declaimed it the way Johnston did, like you weren’t ashamed of what you were saying or, more accurately, afraid that someone was going to pop out from behind a rock, shouting: ‘Shut up with all that shouting, Tallon! You and your fucking poetry, you great big one-eyed fuck!’
There were wisps of cloud floating out across the blue as I swept my hand and boomed: ‘The spring, which had for a long time been held back by frosts, suddenly arrived in all its beauty and everything came to life everywhere. Patches of blue could already be seen in the forest glades, and on the fresh emerald of the young grass dandelions showed yellow and the lilac-pink anemones bowed their tender little heads. Swarms of midges and clouds of insects appeared over swamps; water spiders were already engaged in chasing them; and all kinds of birds were gathering in the dry bullrushes. And they were all assembling to have a closer look at each other. All of a sudden the earth was full of creatures, and the woods and meadows awakened. In the village the peasants had already started their round dances. There was plenty of room for festivities. What brilliance in the foliage! What freshness in the air! What excited twittering of birds in the orchards! Paradise, joy and exaltation in everything! The countryside resounding with song as though at a wedding feast!’
I was exhausted, spent — but delirious when I’d finished.
‘Precious Moment’ Scene
We had been discussing Samuel Beckett at the writing group so I went off up to Dublin to get a few of his books — there were none in Scots-field Library — and just by chance where did I pass? Only Windmill Lane Studios. At first I wasn’t going to bother going in but then I thought of Johnston’s confidence: ‘Of course he’d have come out to say hello to you, Joey!’
So in I went, but as it happened he wasn’t there. But June Enright, the girl who’d written to me, was sitting behind the desk and when I asked to see Bono she couldn’t have been more helpful. Turned out they were still in Miami recording and that things were going real well. ‘All things being equal, their new album should be out around this time next year,’ June told me. Then we got chatting about this and that. Knew quite a lot about literature, did June. Wasn’t that fond of Beckett, though. ‘Doesn’t quite do it for me, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’d be more into the beats.’ I wasn’t all that well up on them, either, but they sure did sound interesting. ‘On the Road — now there’s a book,’ she said. ‘By Jack Kerouac!’ ‘Sure!’ I said. ‘I’ve heard of that,’ and told her about my own plans for going on the road ‘when I get a few bucks together’. ‘Whereabouts are you headed?’ she asked me. It transpired she knew the States inside out and had been there with ‘the boys’, as she called them, over half a dozen times. ‘Oh, here and there,’ I told her. ‘Midwest, the West Coast! All around!’
‘Well, you get reading those beats now!’ she said. ‘Believe me, they’ll blow your mind!’
And was she right! Straight away I went out and bought them. That Allen Ginsberg. ‘Howl’! ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness — starving, hysterical, naked!’ and all that shit. What good was Beckett after that? Three arseholes sitting in dustbins arguing about sweet fuck all and, just when you think it’s all over — thank fuck! — they start it all over again? I had a good mind to do exactly the same with him — fire his books into a bin that I happened to be passing right there and then. But I had to study him for the group so I thought it’d be best to hold o
n to them. Instead I bought myself a baseball cap and sat there smoking. ‘Dodgers’ was written across the front and it felt real good just sitting there in the Clarence Hotel (which U2 own, of course), reading. I couldn’t wait to get home to discuss all this new stuff with Johnston, who would know it inside out, of course.
It was hard not to think of yourself sitting there, maybe going through William Burroughs — another right fucking headcase, went and shot his wife with a crossbow, for Chrissakes! — when, whaddya know, next thing would walk in Bono. ‘Hey, how you doin’, Joey?’ he’d say as I tugged the baseball bill down and answered: ‘Hey, OK, Bono!’ As I pulled some poems, or a film script, maybe, out of my inside pocket. Then after a rap — who knew, even discussing with him the possibility of him writing some songs for the movie, or the entire band doing the soundtrack — heading off to a drinking den, say Lillies Bordello.
If he felt like it, of course. Maybe meet up with The Edge and some of the other ‘musos’.
Screenplay — A Real Possibility
The more I got talking to Johnston the more I started to feel, once and for all, the way you reckoned a real writer should. You nearly couldn’t move in the caravan now I’d filled it with so many books. But not with mystics and ‘the ancients’ and all those fuckers — all they did was tie you in knots — but fiction from all over the world. ‘That’s it, Joey!’ Johnston told me. ‘Read voraciously! All the fiction that you can find! But I still think, deep down, that your story is a movie!’