by Ultan Macken
My parents lived for a few months in that flat in Marlboro Road while I had my own flat not far away. Then my mother found a house to rent, 25 Rosmeen Gardens in Dún Laoghaire, and I joined them there. Each morning I drove into Dublin, but as my father did not have to be in as early he took a bus and then picked up the car to go home. Despite the attitudes of the Abbey actors, one of my lasting memories of that period is the respect that my father had for Ernest Blythe. He told me that, but for Ernest Blythe, the Abbey Theatre would not have survived, as he was a very good businessman. While he accepted that Blythe did not rate intellectual plays very favourably, his choice of plays resulted in the Abbey keeping their audiences happy. In the six months that my father was working there, he tried to exert control over the Abbey players and he had a lot of difficulty with them. Traditionally they never had rehearsals in the morning, and my father insisted that there had to be rehearsals in the morning as well as the afternoon – morning rehearsals did not suit actors who had been out drinking the night before! He was casting plays for the Old Queens Theatre in Pearse Street (the original theatre in Abbey Street had burned down in 1951 and the company spent the next fifteen years in Old Queens Theatre) and made radical choices. He was also preparing the company to move back to Abbey Street to the brand new custom-made building which was due to open in the first week of July 1966. Although used to an independent life where he made his own decisions, now it was his job to make decisions for a group of people and to try to persuade them to work together as a team.
While Seven Arts had taken an option on Seek the Fair Land, a small English company took a film option on The Scorching Wind. The two men involved in this company were Norman Spenser, producer, and Charles Crichton, director, and in March 1966 they came over to meet my father in Oughterard. My father asked me to sit in on those first discussions and said that as I was such a student of cinema, I might have some helpful suggestions. After that first meeting, Norman Spenser wrote my father as follows:
Redhill Cottage,
Denham,
Bucks.
March 29th, 1966,
Dear Peggy and Walter,
I just wanted to tell you – in writing – how very much we enjoyed our visit and how pleasant and exciting it was to meet you both. Quite apart from the pleasure and fun we have had together, it has been enormously helpful, and fruitful, to the eventual script of the film. I am very glad we met, so soon after making an option contract, because I am well aware as anyone of the kind of types that abound in the ‘Film Business’, and I wanted you to get a first-hand impression of not only Charles and myself, but the sort of things we were planning to do to your book and the sort of aims we have for the eventual film.
Well having said all that, I’m looking forward to seeing you both again in the very near future, and I hope that the Abbey Theatre doesn’t take too much of the stuffing out of you – or become too much of a drag. Next time you are in London, you must come down and visit us here in the country, as a change from London.
With thanks again,
Sincerely,
Norman Spenser
Norman Spenser lived in Denham in Buckinghamshire.
The stress of coping with the workload in the Abbey Theatre and his dislocation from the west of Ireland and his peaceful life in Oughterard, all came to a head in June of 1966. Charles Crichton and Norman Spenser paid a second visit to discuss the script. In taking a break from the work, Norman, Charles, my father and mother decided to go out on Lough Corrib for a spot of fishing or boating. The two men were staying at Currarevagh House Hotel and my father brought the boat from its moorings in Derrymoyle over to the pier at Currarevagh Hotel. The two men got into the boat all right but my mother stumbled and fell into the lake. She was not in any danger but she got a terrible fright and my father of course jumped in and pulled her out. They went home, changed clothes and came back to have dinner with the two men in the hotel.
My father was shocked at what had happened and that night in bed, he had a very disturbed sleep and in the morning, he told my mother he had made a decision to leave his job with the Abbey Theatre. That morning he rang Ernest Blythe and resigned from his position, to take effect just after the official opening of the New Abbey in July. He spent the month preparing the official opening night show called Recall the Years, which featured extracts from plays that had become classics of the Abbey stage.
Meanwhile, Norman Spenser and Charles Crichton were still trying to put the film project together. Charles wrote in June, thanking him for bringing them fishing and telling him that he had been in contact with Pat McGoohan and he was interested in taking the part of Dualta in the film.
News also came about the Seven Arts production:
Gort na Ganiv.
Sept. 6th 1966
My dear Ultáin,
Just writing to tell you that Seven Arts came through on the option – so we’ll be getting about £4,000. This, with what I have, should be enough to pay for Menlo and have a bit over to get the new car. If so, you can pick up the Viva – by October I hope – just in time for the winter.
We have to go to Dublin next Sunday the 11th, to see furniture, etc. We’ll stay 2 nights and get home on Tuesday. We’ll give you a ring on Friday to confirm. In the meantime, I’m enclosing £2 so that you can get yourself something for your birthday. You’d want a bit of time to think over how you will spend it!
Charles and Norman were here. We had a long hard session working on the script. I will tell you about it when I see you.
If you like you could take a bus out to the Lucan Spa Hotel on Sunday and meet us for lunch about 1.30. We will try and make it at that time.
All the best,
See you,
Your father
That same day, my father wrote to my brother:
Gort na Ganiv.
Sept. 6th 1966
My dear Wal,
Very pleased to hear from you and to know that things are going well. Can’t wait to see you in glasses. I know they will improve your looks, but how about the intellect!!
See what they did for mine, I’ve been wearing them since I was twelve, and I’m as stupid as ever.
We just have had a very hard four days working on the script of ‘The Scorching Wind’. Norman and Charles were here. We have finally got the script to the stage where it can be printed as a presentation script and sent around to the all the fat money cats of the film business. We should know in a month or two if they will be able to raise the money. It has turned into a good lively script with loads of excitement but any relation it bears to the original is a coincidence. Actually this is not so. There is quite a resemblance but it has a much different shape. It will be fun if they bring it off as they intend to shoot the whole thing in Galway and Connemara. Great excitement for the locals.
You will be glad to hear that Seven Arts are taking up the option on ‘Seek the Fair Land’. This practically means that I will get about £4,000, which with what I have, will pay for the house in Menlo and take that worry off my back. So that means that we will really own Menlo, in partnership with the Income Tax Authorities.
The glass finally arrived for Menlo – 4 panes short – so now we have to wait another two months for these – but we will put in plain glass until they arrive but we hope to be in there before October 1st.
If I can scratch money from the leftovers I intend to get a new car and give Ultan the Viva. That means I have to give you the value of what I give him; so if you set a value on it, I will give you an IOU and the value in cash when we sell the house. This is only just – cannot treat my sons differently and I’m sure you need the money.
Nothing else much to report. I don’t feel by now as if I was ever in the Abbey. It feels like a vague and disturbing dream. Certainly, no matter how hard I try, I feel no regrets. The only regret I have is that I should have said No where I said Yes. I didn’t use the nut at the right time. However, I suppose I can write it down to experience and hope that somehow in the
future, I will be able to use it.
Peggy is well,
All my love,
Your father
My mother wrote to me for my birthday as well:
Gort na Ganiv.
9th Sept. 1966
My dear Ultan,
A very happy birthday to you and many happy returns. I’ll see you on Sunday which is very pleasant and I must say I’m looking forward to it. I imagine you’re delighted that you’re going to get the car – hope you can manage to run it but I’m sure you’ll be economical with it. All is as ever here – Menlo is really nearly ready at last – hardly believable! I think Daddy’s tummy is still acting up alas but he’s looking much better, Thank God. I miss you sadly even if it was only to have you telling me off. I hope you have managed to get a flat and sure we’ll help you to move if you get a flat.
There’s not a sign of the place here going.
Lots of love,
My dear old son,
Always your loving,
Mammy
During the month of September, my mother put severe pressure on the builder to finish and eventually they moved in at the beginning of October. I think it was a huge psychological blow to my father to leave Oughterard. My mother told me years later that she was being practical and explained to my father that they could not go on living in a large house so far away from Galway. Before choosing the site at Menlo village, my father had explored various places near Galway city. He travelled up the Dyke Road and actually found a site over-looking Galway city, but the landowner would not sell it to him. He continued up that road and eventually came around a corner and found a beautiful old Irish village, Menlo. At that time in 1965/66, there were only about one hundred people living there, most of the families had lived in the village for hundreds of years as tenant farmers of the Blake family who owned Menlo Castle.
My father made contact with a local woman, Mrs Martín McDonagh, and she agreed to sell my father a half acre site opposite where she and her husband lived. The site was bought for £100 and my father then planned the construction of a two-bedroom bungalow with an architect and the builder. Because my mother was fed up cleaning out fires, no fireplace was built into the house; it was heated with under-floor central heating. The living room was designed specifically to offer a wonderful view of the village and there were enormous windows from floor to ceiling.
While my father and mother moved into their new house in Menlo, I had moved into a flat in Pembroke Road in Dublin and within a week or so of their moving into the new house, I went down to visit them. I loved the house, and my father and I made some exploratory walks up the road from the house. They went to their daily mass in the New Cathedral.
My father wrote a letter to Rita Joyce a few weeks after they moved into the new house:
Menlo,
Galway.
Nov. 8th 1966
My dear Rita,
Just so that you will know we have finally moved into Menlo. We are here a few weeks now. Did I tell you I had left the Abbey Theatre? If I didn’t, I’ll let you know all about it the next time we meet. The spare room is there with a comfortable bed anytime at all that you want to come. We are gradually getting used to the place. Of course we miss Oughterard but the advantages of this place outweigh the nostalgia of the other.
We haven’t sold it yet and so having paid for this place we are practically poverty-stricken which is good because it will make me want to work. I’ve finished a film script of ‘The Scorching Wind’ for an English film company. It turned out well and they will proceed to make it when they have raised the £1,500,000! I don’t know if they will succeed but if they do we will have some fun for a few months.
Did we tell you that Ultan is now a journalist in the ‘Irish Press’, a Dublin newspaper, starting from scratch. That’s where his science degree ended up, but he seems to love it.
We are both well, Peggy sends you her love. I think you will like Menlo when you see it. It’s a real rural setting and yet it’s only a few miles from Galway. I’m writing away, bits and pieces. Hope everything is going well with you and that we will meet soon.
All our love,
Walter
A letter came from Terese Sacco of Macmillan in London to say that the publisher was doing a hardback reprint of Seek the Fair Land. She had heard nothing from the two film men, Norman Spenser and Charles Crichton, about the filming of The Scorching Wind, other than that they had secured English actor David Warner to play the part of one of the brothers. BBC Radio had also broadcast God Made Sunday.
Brown Lord of the Mountain was published that autumn, possibly in September (in fact it might not have been published until 1967, as that is the date on my hardback edition. I think both my brother and I could have been given early editions of the book). Both my brother and I read it at the same time and Wally Óg wrote to my father and in reply my father spelled out what he saw the role of a writer as:
Menlo,
Galway.
Nov. 21st 1966
My dear Wal,
We just got back from Cork this Monday evening and were very pleased to get your letter. At least if it did nothing else the book seems to have stimulated you into a philosophical frame of thought in which you neatly tabulated – very for me – the philosophical aberrations (if I may call them that) of the last fifty years or so.
Basically, as Gilson says, since there is no such thing as an artistic creator since all artists use things already created to make-up their poems, paintings, books, statues, and they are really makers, they cannot set out to be philosophers. I suppose the literary people are makers of dreams, having the talent to put words into juxtaposition to make a pleasing whole; if all history before them had not happened to make the words they use, they would be dumb, so much do we owe to the millions of people who lived before us.
I have come to the conclusion that the art of the novelist or the playwright is merely the art of the storyteller. Their function is to tell a story in a cohesive form, attracting the attention of the listener; by various devices which is partly instinctive and partly learned over a long period; to hold the attention and when you feel that attention flagging you recall it dramatically with a shift of emphasis – the aim in short should be to hold your listener enthralled once you have got possession of him.
If one of your (readers) listeners starts to yawn, apart from what may be wrong with him – the storyteller is failing in his profession and should be pelted with refuse from the market place, after all the writers whose works have lived on for hundreds of years were essentially great story-tellers.
‘Brown Lord’ started off for me with savage indignation. There was a certain young girl in Oughterard who was simple. In the course of a few years, she was twice made pregnant. The thought of the sly, dirty minds of the men who did that thing is beyond my comprehension. The violent things one would like to do with them. But that’s no answer of course and indignation doesn’t get anywhere except to make a situation worse than it was if it is allowed to break into violence.
It was this aspect that I wanted to explore, joining with Donn [the main character of ‘Brown Lord’], who in his way set the ball rolling and was the architect of most of what followed his original sin. This is the way life seems to be in fact, with a man bewailing everything except the confession of his own guilt, which he refuses to see.
Anyhow I wanted to tell a good story as well for the reader who won’t bother to reflect but who might be caught up in a yarn. I don’t want you to review the book. This doesn’t matter at all. Reviews of men’s work are merely an exposure of the intellect or lack of it in the reviewer himself. How does he know what was in the author’s mind when the poor author is not sure himself? All the author thinks – and is sure of – is that he set out to say something and between the thought and the typewriter something is missing – which he has to find the next time; the next time; the next time.
I’m glad you got what you did get out of it. At least it is an assura
nce to me that I was on the right track even if it ended up a bit misty. I’m glad you like the ending. One expected it to end in a blaze of drama and yet it ends in gentle warmth, almost insouscience meaning more than it actually says. This was just the way it came out even if I expected myself that it would come out differently.
We enjoyed Cork. Saw Máirín O’Connor’s triplets. They are ten months old now, very healthy. Gas to see the three of them, all slightly different and with their own personalities already. Like a gentle joke on the part of the Lord – and the bewilderment it brings to their parents.
We also saw Niall and Mary Porchess in Bunnyconnellan. We remembered the lovely holiday we all had there many years ago.
Again many thanks for your letter – looking forward to seeing you.
Much love,
Your father
Reading Brown Lord of the Mountain I see how my father used ordinary, everyday life experiences and incorporated them into his writing. The wedding in the novel was based on an experience we had when we attended a country wedding of one of our neighbours, who surprised us all when he announced that he was getting married. His bride to be had been working as a nurse in America. We were invited to the wedding, which was held at the house of the bride’s family. My main contribution was to play guitar for the dancers to accompany an accordion player. Poítín was being served and this clear white liquid could be seen in everyone’s glass as they sat outside in the sunshine. Word went around that the parish priest, Canon McCullagh was coming up the road and quick as a flash, the man of the house went around putting orange juice in all the glasses. My teetotal father was unaware of the sleight of hand and he went to drink one of the glasses and nearly choked.
