“He doesn’t live anywhere. You know that.”
“No, Barry Hanafin.”
“County Clare. He’s near the Burren, bring a clothes pin for your nose. And don’t forget what I said—about what’s in fashion.”
She winked.
Two of Barry Hanafin’s poems ranked high on Ronan’s course. “The Tuber” laid down images of the potato famine that swept Ireland in the 1840s and lingered (the point of the poem) in folk memory: “My father’s hospitality/Never overcame his embarrassment/He disliked all mealtime callers/In case their board had more or less than his.”
The English teacher, Andrew Hogan, made much of the “dynamic eight-ten syllabic structure.” Ronan felt much more at home with “My Own Personal River.” He memorized all fifteen stanzas for pleasure and often ran them through his mind; “When you leave the outskirts of our poor town/You never look back but travel on down/Through meadow and woodland, forest and lea/’Til you pour your spirit into the sea.”
In the coach returning from the football game, with the school team unvictorious (again), Ronan contrived to sit beside Mr. Hogan.
“Sir, how many poems do we have to learn?”
Water glistened in thin nostrils. Andrew Hogan possessed not one follicle of visible hair.
“Poems we have to learn? In life or this year?”
“On the curriculum?”
“On the curriculum? Do you feel taxed, O’Mara? When I was your age, I learned a thousand lines of Greek a month. And still helped to milk the cows for my father.”
“I was asking about favorites, sir?”
Mr. Hogan sipped his own saliva.
“Favorites? They all become favorites if you accommodate them.”
“But aren’t favorites mostly old or dead?”
“They don’t have to be. Look at Barry Hanafin,” and Ronan’s mind cheered; his plan was working. Everyone knew how Mr. Hogan bragged of his friendship with the poet.
Ronan began to murmur, “Rise from a pool where the ferns are dark/Over the banks where the rocks are stark/And the mountaintop whose lightning crags/Hang over the land where the river drags…”
As he hoped, Mr. Hogan took up the refrain.
“Its sullen youth, bubbling and hissing/Giving no hint it will one day glisten/And sparkle and shimmy and prettily dance/Down from the hills through the lands of romance.”
Mr. Hogan clapped his hands.
“Don’t you love the way Hanafin makes the stream feel like a flapper—d’you know what a flapper was? They were the girls in Chicago who danced in black dresses with fringes on them; they wore silver little headbands, and they used to do dances called the Charleston and shimmy their hips.”
No, Ronan didn’t feel the poem said anything about Chicago or shimmying girls, but he didn’t say that to Mr. Hogan.
“What do poets look like, sir?”
“Poets look like? Poets look like poets, ordinary people, I s’pose, though some of them have a kind of shaggy twist. Have you never met a poet?”
“There aren’t any living near us, are there?”
“Living near us? Not quality, no, a few go-the-road balladeers with rhymes that have no arse to them. But they’re not poets, their work is dung.”
Next day, Andrew Hogan, in his unnaturally shiny gray trousers, called Ronan across the yard.
“The first Sunday of the month I have to go to Clare, and I’ve to see Barry Hanafin. Would your father drive us?”
Mr. Hogan and John O’Mara knew people mutually, and on their way to pick up his teacher Ronan began to tell whom Mr. Hogan liked—they were “pillars” or they were “dross.” Kate sat with Ronan in the back seat, unable not to laugh. From time to time she scribbled a note; Kate collected “choice remarks.”
Mr. Hogan, when they found him, was talking on the street with Ronan’s history teacher, David Cronin; John climbed from the car and joined in. Kate and Ronan heard them through the open window.
“John, I love teaching him,” said the correct Mr. Cronin. “He has wit and instinct—and such a sense of history’s purpose. And he always grasps the point.”
In a sudden movement Kate turned her head. Had there been any reason, Ronan would have sworn something had made her cry.
John stopped the car at a pub near an old castle. Men in tweed caps sucked at black drinks. Kate emerged from the toilets laughing and held the door open for Ronan to see. On either side of the bowl stood piles of pigs’ heads, a great delicacy on the menu. No wrapping could be seen, just the flat and leather-snouted heads and the little eyes peering brightly, as though they had lost none of their wisdom in slaughter.
After an hour of ale odors, cheese sandwiches, and noise, they set out again. Twenty minutes later, across the white rock moonscape of the Burren, they drew up at Hanafin’s Select Bar. A white goat on a long chain eyed them with a marbled glare.
Andrew Hogan strode ahead. Ronan’s heart boomed, his ears roared. What if he’s here right now? Sitting just inside that red door? He hung back a moment. No Storyteller, though; in the gloom he blinked at the disappointment, bit hard into a fingernail.
“The bard himself. How’re you, Barry? God, the shine on you.”
“Galloping Hogan,” said the red-haired, tufty man behind the bar. He saw Kate. “Who’s your lady friend? Jayzez, she must have bad eyesight.”
Ronan started at hearing the acid Mr. Hogan being mocked.
The poet Hanafin needed thorough washing.
“Girl, you’ve lips on you like flowers, what’s your own name?”
“Kate McCarthy, and proud of it,” she said, laughing.
Mr. Hogan said, “This is my friend, John O’Mara; he’ll help you make your will if you want to.”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a lawsuit,” said Barry Hanafin, his face like a crushed truck. He shook hands with John, took his hand away, and scrutinized it. “Hold on, now. One, two, three, four, and the thumb. All present and correct. When you shake hands with a lawyer, you have to count your fingers, isn’t that what they say?”
Ronan came forward, drawn by Kate and John. Hanafin looked at him, looked at John.
“H’m. I see. What are you—fourteen? Let me look at you. Are you married? No. You look too shrewd for that. H’m. I see. Well, well.”
They settled to drinks, Ronan on lemonade. Andrew Hogan smoothed Hanafin’s edge. Eventually they got to his poems, with Ronan the bait. Hanafin became half a teacher, the other half a performer for Kate. She timed things well, asking, “Where’s the link, would you say, between poetry and the oral tradition?”
The poet bloomed like a lover.
“Funny you ask,” he said. “I’ve a man comes here, sometimes he stays with us, a very distinguished man.” He stared hard at Ronan. “He’s the last Storyteller in Ireland. And I don’t know how long more he’ll last.”
Ronan blinked.
Kate said, “Is he not well?”
“It isn’t only that. People throw him out; they don’t want to hear the old stuff. They only want Clark Gable and Errol Flynn and them lads. This man’s better than any of that crowd.”
Hanafin watched Ronan as he spoke.
“When was he last here?” asked John.
“Three weeks ago. I heard he’s a hundred miles away now. He went up north—Donegal or Carnlough or somewhere like that.”
“And did he tell you a story?” asked Kate.
“Ah, hasn’t he me annoyed with stories?” Barry Hanafin stopped and wondered at something. They waited for him. “But he did tell me this last time a great story about how the Irish discovered poetry. He made it all up, of course. Or—I don’t know. Maybe not.”
John had a skill at prompting reluctant witnesses.
“I suppose it was too long to remember?”
“No, faith,” said Barry Hanafin. “I’ve a good memory for that sort of a thing. Even though he’s a hard man to do justice to. If he’d only put his shoulder to the wheel, he’d make a better poet than most of th
em that calls themselves poets, they’d give you warts on your arse. I wrote down most of him, and I filled in the rest from remembering it.”
Ronan said, “Did he light his pipe?”
“Like a chimney. Or a furnace. We’d a crowd of people in that night, and they were all around him; they love him. He sat on that chair over there, where he always sits.”
Hanafin poured himself two drinks—a large black pint of Guinness and a smaller glass of whiskey. He reached for a sheaf of rough papers from behind the clock on the shelf and began to shuffle through them. When he had arranged them in the order he wished, he drank from the Guinness, then the whiskey. As he opened the top button of his tieless and formerly white shirt, he closed his eyes and inhaled; he looked as though he was winding himself up like a clock or some great hairy toy. At last he began to read.
AS YOU PROBABLY KNOW, NOBODY CAN ACTUALLY write a poem. There’s no such act as writing a poem. That’s not how poems are made. Oh, yes, there’s the physical business of pen, ink, and paper—but that isn’t whence the poem comes. Nor may you send out and fetch a poem from where it’s been living. No, like it or like it not, you have to wait for a poem to arrive.
The people we call “poets,” by which I mean true, real poets—they’re merely very keen listeners who’ve learned to recognize when a poem’s dropping by. Then they copy down what the poem’s telling them in their heads. After that, they tidy up the writing, ask their wives, sisters, or daughters to type it out for them, and so the poem’s finished, next to be seen on the pages of some august publication in the Northern Hemisphere where they pay you minus tuppence per line and hope you don’t visit them naked roaring for more cash.
The thing about true poets is—they never have to wait. Some people are born lucky. They long to eat a hazelnut, and next thing a man walks past their front door with a bag of nuts and he offers them one. Or a woman who likes the fruit called “mango” stands at her window, and below in the street she sees a dark and handsome stranger who holds up his hand and offers her the only mango this side of Rangoon.
Poets are like that with poems. No sooner do they listen out than a poem swoops down, whispers something to the top of their heads, and they feel it flowing down into their brain, down along their arms, into their fingers, and out onto the page in black letters.
And poems are like angels. They visit often, but you’ve to be watching out for them, and you’ve to believe in them to benefit from their gifts. Ireland has a great many poets because we’ve a quiet country here, with empty fields and silent lanes, where it’s very easy to hear poems when they come by. But where did full poetry start here—I mean, that wasn’t religious or prayers? Well, according to my friend the Storyteller, it was all typically Irish. It started because of a husband, his foreign wife, and a lawsuit.
A long time ago, there was a man who lived in the mountains of Galway, in the year of Our Lord nine-twenty-five. A big bucko, with broad shoulders and dark curly hair, he had looks so handsome that when ladies saw him, they wanted to swoon and throw themselves down on his boots. And many of them did.
His name was Jem, and what the ladies truly admired were his hands. With long, strong fingers and skin like ivory, each hand spread the breadth of a shovel. He could bunch them into fists that would protect any woman, or he could use the soft skin of his palms to caress a lady’s flowing locks.
Naturally, therefore, as is the way of the world, many men didn’t care too much for Jem. But men who made his acquaintance or became his friends enjoyed his company.
One man, however, formed a great dislike of Jem. This man’s name was Leary and he suffered from fear. He had no reason to—he had wealth, some good looks, and many capabilities. Fear, however, answers to no logic; some ungifted and stupid men, who should know fear, feel none whatsoever. And some men, gifted and safe, are the most fearful of all.
The reason for Leary’s fear lay partly in a lack of assuredness with ladies. He had dull words, and he couldn’t bring a sparkle to the eye of a star. His compliments came across as ham-fisted. He once said to a lady from Longford, “The last time I saw hair like yours was on a horse my father owned.”
The woman took offense. No girl wants her hair to be compared with the coarseness of horsehair. What she didn’t know was that the horse in question, a champion racer much beloved of Leary, had a floating, glossy tail.
To another woman this man Leary said, “I was thinking of you last night when I was feeding my pigs.”
She nearly swiped him across the face, but what she couldn’t have known was Leary’s affection for his pigs and their sweet pinkness and round little cheeks and high intelligence.
His fear, therefore, as you may now understand, had two fountains—that he’d never gain the heart of a woman, and that if he did, she’d be taken from him by some honeyed fellow such as Jem.
Well—as the smooth wheel of Time rolled onward, fearful Leary found a lady whom he liked very much. Her name was Gloria, she lived in the wooded valleys of Hampshire in England, and she had a round face thought by many to be beautiful. Gloria came to Ireland with her father to buy a horse, and she met Leary at a fair. He showed her how to be careful when buying.
“If the man selling the animal walks toward you, leading his beast, look at the man’s legs carefully. If you think he’s limping, then he’s trying to disguise the fact that the horse is lame.”
He also told her, “When a man won’t let you open his horse’s mouth because he’s afraid the horse’ll bite you, then you’ll know that the horse has no teeth.”
As a result of this sound advice, Gloria bought not one but two fine beasts. Being English, she didn’t take umbrage when Leary said to her, “You have eyes like my dog, Koko”—she could see that Koko had dark and faithful eyes. Englishmen are so dreary that Englishwomen will kiss anything that sounds like honeyed lips.
To cut a long story short, Leary proposed marriage. He had a fine farm, thirty-five pigs, an old servant woman with no insolence, a large milking herd, and two bulls—one for his own cows, and another for the neighbors, so that they’d not sully his good bull with their common beasts. Gloria moved to Ireland, married Leary, and settled down.
Sometimes, the very fact of fearing something is enough to make it happen. Six months married, Gloria met shiny Jem, the handsome man with the big hands. It took place at a fair where Gloria had gone to buy hens. Leary, the new husband, went with her to show off this treasure. He took her here, he squired her there; people shook her hand and complimented him. Never in his life did the man enjoy such popularity—and as I say, he himself was by no means horrible to look at.
They were talking to a cattle drover from Carlow when Jem wanders over, bright as day. He saw Gloria’s legs and thought she was choice. She looked at him, and before the day was over, they had contrived to meet at the bridge below the town. Handsome Jem was a fast mover, and so, we have to agree, was round-faced Gloria.
When they met under the bridge, Jem shook Gloria’s hand, and Gloria returned the handshake with both hands and didn’t let go; Englishwomen have never been backward in coming forward. They swooned for each other. Jem was smitten by Gloria’s cool way of talk, and Gloria was thrilled at Jem’s hands. They said, “We must meet again,” and they went their ways.
Their next tryst took place on a mountainside above Gloria’s new home. Leary, by the way, couldn’t have been a kinder husband; he genuinely loved her and wanted to give her the best. Despite that, one Saturday morning, when Leary was off somewhere birthing a calf, Gloria met Jem under a tree behind a rock.
Jem asked her why she married that droning insect, Leary, when she could have married him. He said he’d been looking for a wife just like her since the day he realized women had been put on earth by God to make men’s lives a joy.
Her heart singing like a linnet, Gloria went back down the mountain to her life with Leary, and that night he saw that she had fallen very moody. He did the sensible thing—he kept out of her way, exc
ept to bring her a drink of hot whiskey before bedtime. Every night before then, these newlyweds had slept like a pair of spoons made by the same silversmith. This night, though, she turned her back on him, hard as a coconut, and went to sleep without as much as a whisper.
Two days later, she met Jem on the mountain again. He lived thirty miles distant, and he complained about the rough ride. Gloria got a fit of fear. She swung herself up into Jem’s saddle and said, “Take me with you.”
There’s an old saying, “Be careful what you wish for—because you may receive it.” Jem felt a bit taken aback. Fun had been his highest motive, but here he was now, landed with a large bundle called Gloria. My mother used to say, “Fun is fun till someone loses an eye.”
But he looked at Gloria, and he thought, “She’s good to look at, and her father’s rich, and I can train her into the idea that I don’t have to be at home every night of the week.” Jem, for all his talk, didn’t know much about women. And so the two misbehavers rode off.
When Gloria didn’t return, Leary grew frantic. He searched the mountain, and he searched the vale. All night he wandered through the heather, holding up a big lighted torch, calling Gloria’s name. He feared she’d been taken by a wolf or had fallen down a cave.
“Gloria!” he called. “Gloria, my love!”
The hills yielded nothing but the echo.
For two days and two nights the poor, distraught man looked high and low for his missing wife. Finally he assembled a great search party. They gathered in the farmyard on their horses and ponies and donkeys, thirty men and boys; Leary’s concern for his wife had washed away much of their dislike for him.
Their compassion grew further at what happened next. Just as Leary told his volunteers from the yard to go north, south, east, and west, a young man rode by.
“What’s the commotion?” he said. They told him, and he looked uncomfortable.
“Is she an Englishwoman with plump cheeks and black hair cut short as a boy’s?”
Leary rode forward.
“Did you see her? Where? Where is she? Is she all right? How is she?”