As to my soul and its guilt and remorse—that remained. Almost undimmed. Not a day passed that I didn’t see those three riddled corpses, and the black pools of blood on the floors of that seedy house. At some point every morning I caught the smell; in fact, it often preceded the wonderful smell of John Jacob’s baking, as though the gods wished to remind me of the foul odors I had caused to be released into the world.
He sensed that something deep troubled me. Or did I frantically wish him to sense it? So that I could confess to him. To anyone? I controlled, as best I could, my bad moments; their worst attacks came in the first two weeks, when my mind hadn’t yet engaged with the material I had come to learn.
I persevered. We concluded that first learning period with a plan: when he deemed me fit, we would indeed take to the road, and he would indeed once again become a traveling storyteller. “We’ll print a poster,” he boomed, with mischief in his eyes. “ ‘Coming Attraction.’ ”
I so wished him to ask me questions about Venetia and me. He never mentioned her name. And I so wished him to ask questions about the Folklore Commission. He never did—but he did reply to a letter from the officials, refusing to see them, and he left the letter and his reply lying around before he sent it. So that I could read it.
A tiredness swept over me after a few days, and so afflicted me that I fell into a deep sleep every night. Yet the morning saw me refreshed and alert, with no stiffness or aches. It took days for me to realize that this was new. In due course I put it down to routine.
When I mentioned it to John Jacob, he said, “The cows of the fields have their routine, haven’t they? They get milked morning and evening, and if they’re not they let everyone know about it.”
131
At last the training in narrative began in earnest. I wanted to drive down on the Sunday night, such was my excitement, but I held back, not wishing to impose upon his own routine. In fact, I arrived at his lane an hour early that Monday and parked a little distance away, backing the car up the same old cart track I had sped into with Venetia when fleeing Little Boy.
You know those mornings when you can hear a bell from across the sea? I heard a distant laugh, voices, then an engine being started. John Jacob’s was the only house within sight or earshot.
The cart track gave excellent cover from the road. Through the bushes I saw a car, newish, emerge from the lane, driven by a woman. To judge from the confident way she drove out onto the larger road, she knew this place.
I had a fragmented view of her; condensation masked the windows of her car. Was she blond? Not sure. She wore a head scarf, and she had a stylish and well-to-do air, not at all the type of woman commonly seen in that countryside of farms and cottages. Age? Couldn’t tell. Not a girl in her twenties; more mature.
She changed gears directly in front of me, slowing down a fraction to do so. If I had to swear to it, I wouldn’t have been able to identify her. Nor would I have been able to swear that it wasn’t Venetia.
I dismissed the thought. Who could be less likely to have visited John Jacob? And who could be more likely than I to imagine that he was spending time with Venetia? I glimpsed her everywhere. An illusion, as you know.
However, one assumption stood out: when somebody is leaving somebody else’s house at eight o’clock on a Monday morning, they’ve likely stayed overnight. Or for the weekend.
Inside, I found no trace of a visitor. Nor did I see breakfast crockery, neither for one nor for two—he had cleared everything before I arrived. But he did that every Monday morning.
My storytelling lessons began with form, not content. We spent many weeks on technique. He began each frame of teaching with a question, his first being “Do you ever go to the cinema?”
“I do. Often.”
“What’s the first thing that happens when the picture begins?”
I said, “There’s the title, and the names of the actors, and the most important people working on it.”
“Anything else?”
“Often there’s a piece of writing or a place and a date.”
“And what’s the purpose of all that information?”
“To tell you who everyone is,” I said.
“But they often tell us about a whole lot of people at the end. So why don’t they keep the information from the beginning till the end?”
“Because they want it to be seen? Before people get up and leave?”
“I always stay and watch every name,” he said. “I feel I should. In order to honor their work. But that’s beside the point. Before I answer my own question let me ask you something else: what do I do before I begin to tell you a story?”
“You fiddle with your pipe. You lay everything out beside you. You make sure to be organized.”
“And why do I do all that?”
I said, “So that you’ll tell the story better.”
John Jacob nodded. “Fair enough. But what I’m doing is exactly the same as the cinema. I’m giving you time to settle down, and I’m creating anticipation. That’s the first step in storytelling: appetite.”
“Shouldn’t I be taking notes?”
He said, “You can write all this down tonight, if you like, but if we were back two thousand years ago, you’d be memorizing it all. Now, what’s the next step?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
He said, “Authority. You must make the audience comfortable. To do that, you need authority. You have to make them feel that the story is entirely yours to command. You can do this in a number of ways—by making a quiet beginning or having a humorous start. Humor suggests confidence. Or a mischievous one—mischief is good, too. We’ll elaborate on all these points every day. Two ingredients, so far, right?”
“Appetite.” I counted on my fingers. “Authority.”
“What’s the third ingredient? Address,” he said. “Did you ever play golf?”
“No. My father did.”
“In golf, the golfer ‘addresses’ the ball. The storyteller addresses things in an even more vital way—he addresses the audience and the story. By this I mean he speaks to the audience as though they were his creatures, and nobody else’s. And he behaves toward the words coming out of his own mouth as if there could be no other words feasible ever again. That’s what I mean by Address. Intense focus.”
132
The Three A’s. That’s how I began my master classes in storytelling with John Jacob O’Neill: appetite, authority, address. Session one lasted from half past nine to eleven; the second from a quarter past eleven to one o’clock, when we broke for lunch. Our third began at two o’clock and ended at a quarter to four, and our fourth session began at four o’clock and ended at six; it usually consisted of me repeating all that he had told me that day, and asking related questions.
During that first week I asked him why he had made the last session so long, especially at a time of day when people fell asleep.
“That’s precisely why,” he said. “So that you’ll defeat the sleep demon.”
Before we got to language and delivery, we visited every corner of physical technique. He spoke about hand gestures, movement on the chair, leaning in different directions, eye contact, inflections, how to use a prop such as a glass with liquor in it or a pipe—in my case, he suggested a pen.
What clothes should a storyteller wear, in general? He had two ideas: either conform to an image people might have of what a storyteller should look like (as with my black coat, black suit, black tie, white shirt, and black boots) or go the exotic route and wear a coat of many colors, like a Gypsy.
Each had its advantages and drawbacks. My habitual garb made me look, he said, “not unlike an undertaker—but it won’t distract people.” Were I to wear, say, a coat like a wizard’s, all bright color and wild pattern, it would announce me, he said, as “exotic, and it might fascinate the people listening to you, but would they hear every word, or would they be too busy looking at your coat?”
He favored what he called
“clothes with a strong identity.”
“Explain?”
“I dress like an Irishman. Or, to put it more directly, nobody is surprised at the clothes I wear, and yet they’re distinctive enough for me to be noticed. And taken seriously.”
These practical teachings took months. They included how to knock on a door, how to enter a house, how to greet the people: “As though you’re delighted to see them and as though you’re bringing them something special—which you are.”
He taught me how to charm a housewife who groaned at the thought of an extra mouth at the table and grimaced at the notion of her children being up till all hours. “Tell her,” he said, “that you heard of her kitchen’s great hospitality. She can’t go against that.”
If the storyteller knows the house has children, “wear a watch and chain across your vest. Finger the chain, and the child will surely ask you the time. Take out the watch, open it, and show it to the child, and tell the child a story about the watch.”
I asked him, “What story do you tell?”
“I might make one up. I might say to the child, ‘Until very recently, this watch was around the neck of a baboon.’ Always use a notable word to a child—like ‘baboon’ or ‘chimpanzee.’ So: ‘The creature took it off an explorer who was attacked by a lion in the jungle, but the lion couldn’t digest the watch and threw it up. Now, it so happened that the explorer’s brother went looking for him, and he saw the watch flashing and winking high in the trees above the jungle, and he lured down the baboon with bananas, and got back the watch, and that’s how he knew that his brother had died.’ ”
He asked me, “In the middle of a story, how do you retain the attention of your listeners? It might be late at night. The fire makes people sleepy—so what do you do?”
I shook my head, aware that I wasn’t expected to know.
“That’s when your technique comes most to help you,” he said. “You do things.”
For the next few minutes he showed me all kinds of small movements. He searched for matches; he mopped his brow with his pocket handkerchief; he crossed one foot over the other; he paused on an upward inflection, as though interrupting himself with his own sense of wonder at the tale he was telling. At one moment he looked away, to gaze down into the fire and shake his head, as though he felt staggered by what he was about to tell. Next he clapped his hands hard together and exclaimed, “And do you know what?”
I hadn’t observed him using many of these stratagems when he was telling me stories, and I said so.
“But you never fell asleep,” he said. And chuckled.
Every night, by the fire after dinner, four nights a week (after Friday’s final session, I drove back to my house outside Dublin), he told me a full story. Nothing was required of me but to listen.
He took me all over the world in those tales. I learned about a boy in Cuba who slew a blood-sucking creature that had been terrorizing a village. He told me a story about a dance marathon in Russia, where the prettiest girl in the village made her many young suitors dance all day and all night, and she would marry the last man standing. Who was blind.
From Italy he had a tale of a man who made a bargain with a witch and tried to renege on it. The island of Ireland has thirty-two counties, and for eight weeks he told me a story from each county—in alphabetical order.
He told me the shortest story in the world: “That evening, the last creature left on earth saw the sun going down in the east.” The longest, he said, “would take seven years, seven months, seven weeks, seven days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. And note,” he continued, “that we use seven devices for measuring time—years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.”
Before he considered me ready for the exalted level of telling him a tale, he and I analyzed a number of legends. He showed me how to lead with a strong character. “Or, better still,” he said, “with a weak character who grows strong, because the best legends are those where we learn how to overcome what besets us.”
Conflict, he said, lay at the core of every story, because we face pressure all day, every day.
“Walking against the wind—that’s the least of it. Getting up, going to bed, preparing food, eating food—we futile creatures must struggle all the time. Nothing that we need comes to us; we must reach for everything.”
He boiled down “the things we call stories” into three simple components: “Somebody does something for some reason. Or,” he said, “Who does what and why? After that, language is the toolbox. In there, you should find shiny, beautifully polished and honed tools, with sharp edges or hammerheads or needle points, and with those tools you will fashion your tale.
“But, as with all tools, you have to learn how to respect them, and how to use them with accuracy and elegance. I mean to say, you never see a master carpenter take his toolbox, open the lid, and toss the whole thing up in the air. How would he ever get his table made? And he certainly wouldn’t get the lovely marquetry inlay done, and the dovetailing and detailing.
“And at the end of the day, after using his tools on the job to the best of his ability, the carpenter will be tired—and so he should be, because he has made an effort to work hard and with grace, to create something that is poised and admirable, intended to bring pleasure to people.”
A great leap forward came when he sent me out of the house to the top of the lane and told me to walk back as though approaching the house for the first time, with the intention of telling stories by the fire. We opened the door to heavy rain. He didn’t say, “Wait till the weather clears”; he said, “Well, you’ll be out in all weathers, and you’re used to it anyway.”
My heart racing, I waited, then walked back down the lane as, so to speak, an actor. I knocked on the door as directed: three firm, spaced knocks. He took his time answering, and I said, “God save all in this good house.”
“And yourself,” he answered.
“Do you have room in your mind for a tale of life itself, a tale of wonder, wisdom, and delight?”
When he’d taught me that line I’d said to myself, I wouldn’t have been able to resist that if I’d heard it at my door.
After what he called “some furnishing and burnishing,” we moved on to embrace content. This training, naturally, took the longest time of all. During our tuition segments, he trained me in four stories. First he told me the entire tale, and then I had to repeat it to him. Then he went back over it piecemeal, and I repeated segments.
He criticized my pace—“too fast, too anxious.” And my smile—“too frequent, too false.” Of my language he said, “Not rich enough, not strong enough.” And on we went, until I told those four stories in their entirety to him at night, in the time between dinner and bedtime, the time he usually told me tales I hadn’t heard.
Monday night, the story about the chariot maker and the boy who could speak to horses: no comment on my telling. Tuesday night, the woman who tamed a whale and rode on its back down the coast to see her mother: no comment. On Wednesday night I told the old Irish legend of the children of Lir, condemned to live as swans in the cold places of the earth: he listened as keenly as a child and made no comment.
On Thursday night, I finished telling, as he had taught me, the story of the man who made a wooden horse and then breathed life into it, and went on to create from the same timbers a woman, whom he then married. As I spoke the words, “That is my story, and now that it has left my mind and gone to live in yours, another story will soon take its place,” John Jacob rose from his seat and stood looking into the fire. After a pause, he spoke:
“It occurs to me to say, ‘You’ll do well.’ But you work best when praised. Therefore I’ll not stint on what I think and feel. You’ve taken on this training with vigor and conscience, and you’ll be hailed as having donned the mantle of the great tradition. Wherever you go in the world you will be respected and welcomed, as long as you continue to honor the story in the way I heard you do all this week.”
Children, I didn’t let him see the tears in my eyes. That night, I think, counts as the only night in which I didn’t sleep. His praise worked some balm into me—not enough, I know, to erase that awful stain, but it helped, and I lay in my bed, not hating myself as much.
133
A month later, John Jacob Farrell O’Neill made what he called his “final, final” appearances as a traveling seanchai. And I embarked upon a life that had once been his. We’d agreed that watching him work would count as my last tuition. After that, we would have what he called “an important conversation.” I was to tell him my own philosophy of storytelling—which he expected me to have worked out by then. That had to happen, he said, before I’d be ready to go out on my own.
In our planning we’d agreed not to be foolish. Yes, we’d approach every door on foot as though we had been walking all day, but we would travel everywhere by car. And we would park just out of sight of each house to preserve the illusion.
As a second concession, to his age and the times we lived in, we would make it clear that we didn’t expect to stay in the houses we visited.
“I’m too old to share a bed with another man,” he said, “and you’re too young,” and we laughed. “However,” he added, “if the lady of the house is free to make amorous overtures, I’ll compete with you for her affections.”
To which I said, and I knew it to be true, “I’m afraid I wouldn’t stand a chance in that contest.”
I think we were only half-joking.
It crossed my mind at that moment to ask him about the prosperous-looking blond lady I’d seen driving away from his lane that bell-clear morning. I’d never seen her since then—but I had taken care not to arrive early on a Monday again. True, I did sneak around the place once or twice on Mondays afterward, but I saw nothing evidential. Unless you count a new box of Black Magic chocolates sitting on the table in the scullery, near the sink.