‘You mean that article by the window. It has four legs but it is not a table.’
‘Well what is it if I’m not asking you to spill a secret?’
‘It’s my bed.’
‘Mean to say you sleep in that? Well, well …’
And so it went on. He called my inlaid walnut wardrobe ‘the press’. It was just one litany of insult. When about to take his merciful departure, he said this:
‘I’ll ask Kelly to come and have a look and give us a price. But I’ll tell you a funny thing about shifting furniture.’
‘What?’ I asked, frankly dismayed. He put on an oracular frown.
‘It costs just the same,’ he intoned, ‘to shift good stuff as junk. Sometimes it costs more because rubbish often collapses when it’s moved. The removal man has to allow for that. Everything here is riddled with woodworm. But the men who deal in this sort of trade are cute enough. I know one character that takes on decorating jobs, hanging paper and all that. He has one iron rule. In an old place like this, he will paper the whole place for you but he’ll put the new paper on top of the old. Know why?’
‘I do not.’
‘If you were to take the paper off the walls of an ancient joint like this, the walls might collapse. The paper holds the house together. Do you follow?’
I showed him out. What else could I do? Then I nearly passed out.
The forgetting of eaten bread
In the last year or so I have come to suspect that I am possessed of a great blessing which will bring me great solace, happiness, and the boon of the eternal ever-new; or else that I am labouring under a terrible curse, a sort of cerebral derangement that sooner or later is bound to get me into serious trouble.
The other night I was at my bookshelves looking for a certain volume and was surprised to see there Lady Gregory’s Journals, 1916–1930, edited by Lennox Robinson. Where had this come from? I opened it at page 96 – the secret page on which I write my name to catch out borrowers and book-sharks – and my signature was there all right. The book was mine. I opened it here and there and found nothing I could recollect as having seen before. Eventually I sat down and read the whole thing, and every bit of it was new. Yet I MUST have read it before. You see my dilemma? I seem to have the gift of totally forgetting in a very short time everything I read. This miraculously renews my library every year or so.
It was not an old book – first published 1946 by Putnam. ‘Old book’? What am I talking about? Beside it on the shelf were two others. One was Xenophontos Kurou Paideias – Biblia Okto, published in London in 1765; among the printers was T. Caslon, a member of the family of great typefounders after whom the Caslon fount is still named. Greek text impeccable, all footnotes and comment in faultless Latin; probably a valuable volume. The other book was a collection of poems by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1842. Nothing remarkable in that, perhaps, except for the inscription on the title page in spidery faded writing: ‘William R. Hamilton, Observatory’. Imagine the great inventor of quaternions wallowing in Tennyson!
Augusta Regina
It is a fascinating book, though the Journals are necessarily severely abridged. Augusta Perrse was born in 1852 at Roxboro’, Co. Galway, and strictly of the old landlord class, her father at one time owning over 4,000 acres. In 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, an MP, of nearby Coole Park. He died in 1892 but she had one son, Robert, who was killed in the 1914 war. Sir Hugh Lane was her nephew and the recent tortuous part-return of the Lane pictures has brought Lady Gregory’s memory back to many people, for those pictures were one of the great worries and preoccupations of her life.
The urge to keep a diary is a curious one, and can even be dangerous. What a to-do there has been over those Casement diaries! But in those 42 typewritten volumes of Lady Gregory’s Journal, she has left a vivid portrait of herself, her friends and contemporaries, and her times. She wrote well and had an amazing memory right to her death at the age of 80 in 1932.
On her husband’s death she naturally took over Coole Park and, although never quite severing her ancient landlord allegiance, she took an extraordinary and kindly interest in the local people, was interested in all flower and plant life, became deeply engrossed in folklore and local customs, in due course came like her neighbour Edward Martyn to support avidly the Gaelic League and virtually became a sort of upper-class separatist and Republican, though her sympathies here lay more in the cultural sphere.
Most people are aware of the main compartments of her career: her life-long friendship with W. B. Yeats; the Abbey Theatre, her tasks there in both management and playwriting; the Lane pictures; and her experiences in both the Black-and-Tan terror and the Civil war, followed by the slow establishment of the Free State. Her day-to-day account of those last-named episodes is extraordinarily impressive and vivid, for such an account has an immediacy that any formal history written long in arrear must lack. Her narrative of Black-and-Tan terrorism – the murders, beatings, burnings, robberies and looting – would startle those younger people whose personal memory does not embrace that terrible era. Her own position in remote Coole required courage, for her interest in native things and people was not healthy when demented Black and Tans were at large and unused to making fine distinctions; but of personal courage it is clear that she had any amount.
The Abbey Theatre
The Abbey, its genesis and growth, was the focus of her life and personality, and many people will be absorbed by the first timid appearance and the development and triumph of the well-loved players so many of whom are now dead – Sally Allgood, F. J. McCormick, Michael Dolan, Arthur Sinclair, Will Shields, and many more. Another different if complementary panorama is presented in the comings and goings of the many new playwrights the Abbey brought forth; money was always tight, there were constant rows and bickerings and nearly everybody concerned – players and playwrights alike – had to have their first reliance on ordinary modest jobs by day. Normal pay for a top actor was for many years of the order of £4 a week, and these were people who created a new theatre and a new mode of acting. Barry Fitzgerald was in late middle age before he could dare to throw up a modest job in the civil service. Yeats himself was, of course, a great inspiration to all but he was by no means a man of affairs and often caused annoyance and irritation.
Sean O’Casey was the centre of the greatest upheaval. After the great success of Juno had established him, The Plough and the Stars led to disorders and near-riots very reminiscent of Synge’s Playboy opening. But when the Abbey Board rejected the Silver Tassie, the row and recriminations were immense and led to O’Casey’s self-imposed exile. Yet nobody could quarrel with Lady Gregory herself, not even O’Casey.
Some People
There are many intimate little portraits of famous people who were Lady Gregory’s friends – Bernard Shaw, Sir Horace Plunkett, Lady Ardilaun, Gogarty, A. E. Martyn, George Moore, James Stephens and many others. It is perhaps no coincidence that they were all not only talented but also very decent people, for it is impossible to imagine Augusta permitting herself to associate with wrong types. She had a sense of humour, too, and is quite funny about the take-over of the Viceregal Lodge, the arrival of Tim Healy and the succession in due time of the MacNeills.
I never met Lady Gregory but some six or seven years ago I accompanied Michael Scott, the architect, to Coole; he had been retained to design a plaque for Yeats’s Norman Tower at Ballylee, hard by. We visited Coole itself, now in the hands of the Land Commission. The wooded approach drive is magnificent but of Lady Gregory’s beloved mansion not one trace remains.
Some big blunders in literature
The father of Benjamin D’Israeli, later to become the Earl of Beaconsfield, was Isaac D’Israeli, with the lifespan of 1766–1848. He was a writer and much interested in a subject he called literary history; his reading was vast, his gift for languages exceptional, and his erudition well-founded and deep. Apart from some novels and poems, his best-known work was Curiosities of Literature whic
h was issued in several parts between 1791 and 1834: it is a veritable treasure-home of what is odd, comic and fascinating.
On a book-barrow I have come on one of the volumes of some 550 pages published in 1839 and today I think I could do worse than purloin some of the facts he has collected under the title of Literary Blunders. At least I will not be infringing his copyright.
Credulous Readers
The cynicism and doubts of our own age did not exist in Isaac’s day. When Dante’s Inferno was published it was widely accepted as a true narrative of the poet’s descent into hell. Similarly when Sir Thomas More’s Utopia appeared, nearly everybody believed that this visionary republic really existed, thought the book was genuine history and a movement was set on foot to send missionaries there to convert so wise a people to Christianity.
A certain clownish writer named Dr Campbell published an ingenious work named Hermippus Redivuvus which pretended to be a treatise on hermetic philosophy and universal medicine. So well did he maintain his portentous style, that several educated people were taken in.
He argued that human life could be prolonged by inhaling the breath of young women. Another physician who had himself written learnedly on health matters, eagerly accepted this new doctrine to the extent of taking lodgings in a ladies’ boarding school so that he could have the students’ breath in abundant supply, and many other people took similar steps.
A commentator named Fabiani, quoting a French account of travels in Italy, mistook for the name of the author these words he found at end of title-page Enrichi de deux Listes (or ‘Enriched with two lists’). He wrote: ‘That Mr Enriched with two lists has not failed to do justice to Ciampini’ – a district he had visited.
The Unperceiving Clergy
Our anecdotal archivist Isaac, whose family were Jews from Venice, quite often found part of his fun in the writings and doings of ministers of the Christian Church. There is however no rancour in his discoveries. Some of the monks of yesteryear were rather ignorant and one of Isaac’s stories concerns a legal row a certain pastor had with his parishioners concerning the responsibility for paying the cost of paving the church. The priest went to the reputed writings of St Peter and quoted the phrase Paveant illi, non paveam ego. He thought this meant ‘They are to pave the church, not I.’ In fact the Latin verb paveo means ‘I am trembling from terror’ and has nothing whatever to do with paving.
Collie Cibber wrote a play he called Love’s Last Shift. It was very popular and in due course translated into French. The translator named it La Dernière Chemise de l’Amour.
The valued Latin writer Petronius was for many centuries famed (or notorious) for the fact that his surviving writings were fragmentary. The world of learning was startled when a professor in Lübeck got a letter from another in Bologna saying, ‘We have an entire Petronius here; I saw it with my own eyes.’ The Lübeck man hastened immediately to Bologna, sought out his correspondent and asked to be shown ‘the entire petronius’. He was conducted to a church and shown the body of St Petronius.
Another writer, translating a treatise on Judaism from Latin to French, rendered Omnis bonus liber est by ‘Tout livre est bon’, a remark that would no doubt enrage our own censorship board.
Tom Brown’s Guesswork
Still another writer named Tom Brown whom at the moment I cannot identify was translating a composition named Circe, presumably in German, and came upon the word Starne, the meaning of which he was not sure about. Apparently relying on the sound of the word, he translated it ‘stares’. But a later translator went to the trouble of making sure what Starne meant and found it was red-legged partridges!
These are merely samples from Isaac D’Israeli’s essay on literary blunders but gives some idea of his tireless search for absurdity. Another day I hope to summarise his comment on other subjects, for there was apparently no limit to his choice of matters for discourse. It is a pity to find nowadays that he is out of print and quite unknown to nearly everybody.
Oh, dear me! more holidays!
I am sure everybody knows the original link between holiday and holy day. A good few centuries before now, important Church holidays were preceded by a period of light-heartedness on the part of the faithful. It is true that the hearts got lighter than they had any right to, and the situation looks the more odd when one reflects that those customs arose a long time before anybody dreamt of conceding the working classes anything in the way of real ‘time off’.
Not so much in Britain – and certainly not in poor Ireland – the excesses of the people on the continent in medieval times just when an important religious event was in the offing were considerable indeed, and not infrequently seriously worried the local Prince or Landgrave. Perhaps the root of the worry was not so much that they were drinking or dancing too much, or behaving riotously, but simply that they were not doing any work. What about the sowing of the harvest, the vines, or the mere mending of shoes? But the Church itself did not condemn such procedures out of hand, and over the centuries some system of accommodation was found.
This age of ours should not be regarded, as too readily it is, as the one which invented appeasement. In what I have said above I indicate where most of us got what we call our holidays, and how this most suspicious thing started at all. Holidays in the ordinary sense are a turbulence, a disturbance, an abomination and a terrifying nuisance.
The Awful Seaside
I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror. What about being packed off as toddlers to stay with the aunt for six weeks? That stern lady who made custard every day and who otherwise thought the staff of life was porridge? You remember those tyrannical obsessions about washing necks, going to bed early, and being respectful? These procedures can have a disastrous consequence; now myself approaching middle age, I think I can truthfully say that I have not properly washed my neck since 1931.
But the most critical disaster was surely the discovery about a century ago of the sea by the land-bound British. They found the sea was very good for you, not in its ancient sense as an occasion of empire and world conquest but as something to get into on mild strands and let it cover you up to the oxters and maybe higher. The ‘resorts’ then came to the fore, the ‘bathing machines’, the sand, the buckets, the unbelievable seaside lodgings and ultimately the pier with its band, phoney negroes, ice cream, and that most marvellous of all atrocities – Sundays when absolutely nothing was permitted.
Naturally Ireland was slow in following this cross-channel opulence of expansion to the letter, yet not a few good men and true still alive here are innocent of a youth which did not have some of that terrifying quality. Skerries, for instance. I have carried around in my juvenile socks more of the sand of that place than would rebuild the Four Courts, again and again I have fallen on the weedy slime of its rocks to the extent of splitting my sconce, and once spent two months every summer in a house which, though two-storeyed, slated and fine, had no running water or sewerage. (To be just, I think arrangements are a bit better now.)
Do people still go in for this lunacy? Well, I suppose they do. But why? That’s a big question.
Some New Ideas
Yet all is not bleakness. I think the main boon for a person going away for a while is to make it crystal-clear to himself and all others that he is not going on his holidays. The person who uses that horrible phrase is bunched. A business-trip, perhaps? To Istanbul?
I do think the seaside holiday is largely discredited. But take care that something worse does not take its place, for something far worse nearly happened to my good self just before Easter. Two chaps I know were good enough to ask me whether I would care to join them on three or four days away from it all? The idea sounded good but I was suspicious. A quick trip by air to Tunis? Nice enough, but surely expensive; even a bit dangerous, perhaps, with all those gun-happy characters in Morocco. I gave a tentative three cheers but modestly asked where they were going. Oh, Galway – Kerry, maybe. Fine
– but how?
By Caravan!
I did not back down on the spot. This, I said, was a new thing and terribly interesting. I would see them, I explained, the following night for a further talk. And so I did, bringing a loose but commodious waterproof bag reasonably filled for the novel trip the day after. I was asked what was in it? Just a few essentials, I explained – a few clean shirts, pyjamas, change of pants and jackets, soap, shaving gear, a few towels, a raincoat, some elementary medical stores, and a bottle of whiskey.
I can only report that the row was appalling. Did I think I was going on safari to darkest Africa? Who did I think I was? What did I mean by shaving? Surely I knew what it was for a few fellows to knock about together for a few days in the land of their birth? Towels?
I didn’t know much about a few fellows knocking about a few days – and don’t. I didn’t go. But I brought that whiskey safely home.
Manners also maketh the boy
My business, varied and mysterious as some may judge it, frequently brings me to Dublin city and entails bus trips about the suburbs. I have encountered one startling thing so often in the early afternoon and in different localities that I think I might mention it here.
The bus is nearly empty and I am on the top deck, peaceably trying to read a paper. It pulls up at a stop and presently all bedlam breaks out. Shouts and shrieks fill the air and the vehicle shudders as it is assailed apparently by a horde of redskins. There is a clattering on the stairs and suddenly the whole upper saloon is filled with an inundation of bawling schoolboys aged, I should say, between 8 and 12.