by Anne Scott
Both of us knew about mutabilitie, time’s winged chariot, and I could hear Yeats’s poem on the splintering choice between work and life. We could understand Hamlet’s fight between conscience and need and that the readiness is all. None of those ideas had made us practical and I backed away in fear of error or recrimination. We had been made strong by knowledge but had no experience with negotiation. The long pilgrimage seemed to have led to no certainty of anything except powerful feeling and I mistrusted that. I was wrong, too young to know how swiftly it would have taken us on and through.
The four years dissolved on a crowded corner of Princes Street, a place alien to our Old Town readings, our Bauermeister’s, our cafe and the library. The choice was put to me hard worded, then immediatelysoftened by time to think it through.
But in the considering time, I remembered what I had seen from that early window, the gleaming sky unmistakably life and future still to be known, and we brought our time together to a close.
Bauermeister’s made changes too. In 1966 it moved from the Mound to George IV Bridge and a spacious shop fronted with tall pillars and wide windows. It had the look of a classical Greek Library, light, airy, noble. The old cash register had travelled from the Mound and stood again in use on the desk. Now and then I went there with my schoolboy son and then we would go next door to the Milk Bar: and I would run for no more trains taking me away from my happiness. So I am glad to have known them, the people and events apparently withdrawn.
16. Carraroe, Connemara:
Henry James at Home
The village of Carraroe in Connemara is sending me on a chase as I try now to put Tomas MacEoin and his gift into words about a single day. It should be a song in truth, a song of a chapter. The picture in my head now is all impressions of a high wind and sun. I see the road on the coast with no end, only curves like Tomas’s silences.
He is a singer like no one else. At Mass in the church by the shore his voice shimmers upward in a sea-cry, the choir sound tumbling in waves beneath, and soars with the pain and thrill of living in this extremity where his fields have walls cut from the same stone as the road, his house, and the church. He is a Gaelic poet.
His house is behind us this bright day. Once it was narrow and in need, old in an ancient place and fallen. When it was almost too late to save, he would not betray it back into the ruins of its first stones but would find another way to go on living there. It could be given new walls built round the old, he said, and so it was.
Today he had made me tea in the new kitchen and we had sat for a while in silent amazement at change. But the tea tin was all but empty and the sugar was done, and the matches spent. I began with my pen and a paper, always writing to make things happen, and together we made ‘an order’ to take along the road to the shop. It had been the Post Office when Tomas was a child.
The grocer’s radio was playing springy music. His name was Micheal O’Domhnaill and away from here he was a popular actor and a farmer too. His shop was the whitest place in the village, brilliant with ceiling lights over the shelves and his counter. Even the paper bags were white, a neat lift of them raised between the apples and the leeks: two punnets of good garden strawberries tilted on the HD ice-cream cabinet. Farming newsprint, cakes and bread left by the van from Galway, the makings of an afternoon’s ease. Whiskey too, for the night time, and lemonade, glittery-clear American Cream Soda, tobacco, pens, cigarettes.
‘We need tea, and – ‘Tomas said. It gathered on the counter, what he needed, the sugar, the matches, the tea, and it all went into a white bag. Tomas was turning now, not to the door but to the far end of the shop, leading me to follow him. Back there, what might have been a cupboard once, and was now an alcove, had been lovingly transformed into a wide, low bookcase, painted and dusted, well away with its back to the noise and the hurry of the counter. Its little wall enclosed it, gave it a difference.
One or two of its books were sea stories, some were novels for the tired evenings. There was a history of Ireland, some maps too, and a short line of classics, beautiful hardbacks, dust-jacketed in colours. In this country, in this west land, culture is natural, unforced, unseparated from the day’s other needs. Tomas leaned forward and said, ‘re might be one of them you would care for?’
I found The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. It was a book I would care for, care to have and care for forever. Tomas was buying it from the shop for me, to mark something unusual in the day, the house renewed, the weather brilliant and alive, the sea wild but kindly, someone with him to fetch the tea, the sugar, and the matches for the fire.
In the evening of that day, we met again, this time in Hughes’ Bar in Spiddal, a legendary pub for masters of traditional music and singing. The friends with me were from home, from Scotland. When the songs began and someone called for Tomas, he would not sing: too sad, or just as likely, too caught in the warmth of the craic, his friends, his drink, the sounds of our voices. When the evening ended, we all went in the summer dim to my rented summertime house near at hand where the craic could continue. Men brought in their fiddles and accordions and laid them under their chairs. The fire was made up of turfs, scented like moorland and warming the lamplight. There was talking and playing and somebody had stories about the Aran Islands and John Synge.
Time passed, people stood up with a quiet word and went home, till there were only two or three people in the room. The turf in the grate fell into small flames, and Tomas began to sing softly in Gaelic ‘She Moved Through The Fair’. There was no other sound anywhere. He sang the last haunted refrain into silence, said goodnight.
The room was cooling, with the sky lightening from the east, but I sat on. Tomas’s book for me glimmering on the window sill was an immigrant from America. It lay here in Connemara where so many Irish men and women had dreamed of its country and a new life, Tomas’s family among them. Its Boston author Henry James was himself the grandson of Irish emigrants to America in 1789, by descent a Cavan man.
In 1989, not long before the time I write of, Tomas published a volume of poems written in Gaelic with his sister, Mary Flaherty of Galway. There was talk of an English translation, but he refused, would not have it happen. It is one thing to have your house transformed into a new shape, to let the joiners and masons rework it. But your poetry, your book, is your true dwelling place, like your song. And so this poem is for Tomas, my song for the book he gave me from the shop.
DWELLING PLACE
For Tomas MacEoin
No, he said. They will not translate.
The old croft where his father sang
And mother danced
Had fallen.
Rain seeped and soaked and pooled
The boyhood hollow where he slept.
No, he said. They will not pull it down.
They built around, confined it in another stone
Until his windows darkened
In a rim of ancient house
Humble and outfaced.
He made no sign
But every day
Intent upon the real construction of his life
Defied the burial of his verse by eager men.
For they would tongue his words,
Groove them
With a different tool,
Alter the beam and lintel
Of his line and render it
Untrue . . .
Offer a daytime for a sunlit noon.
No, he said. They will not translate.
This wintertime
His house is watertight. No shift of stone
Allows a comma of the starlight in.
His words are safe
And broken in their surface
Perfectly.
17. Kenny’s Bookshop, Galway, Ireland:
How to be in Ireland
It was always the staircase that made me go back, medieval-profile steps climbing through the floors, circling them, intent on the reach upwards to the oldest and rarest books, the last footfall touching on a wrinkl
ed patterned carpet. This top space was a wide room like a New York loft with south-west windows over an ancient track from Harbour to Cathedral, now the High Street. To the east it looked down into an empty Middle Street, a white-stone place where there is a paschal look in the air. Columbus passed along these streets in 1477.
In that topmost room there are small stools to sit on, one or two covered with reddish gold cloth. There’s no strict alphabetical design in the bookshelves: these volumes are not minded to follow categories. What they understand is time and so they stand and lean among their contemporaries, friends some of them, enemies too. The most expensive and rarest are cosseted in clear film covers for their age and famousness, for their being by John Synge, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel . . .
This is not where I could buy a list of books, but one or two I have. The last was ‘Circus Animals’ Desertion’ about the late work of W.B. Yeats. I bought it for Yeats, of course, but as well for the author, Norman Jeffares who was once my tutor at Edinburgh University. How young we were then, both of us: he conducted his 9 a.m. tutorials (on the 19th century essayists) with his cat listening on his shoulder. On another morning in Kenny’s, I found his unmatched 1988 biography W.B. Yeats, a life and a study which even after the recent millennial decade of biographies on Yeats, reads like the one Yeats would have called noble and clear. I discovered more in the loft room: Yeats’s Myth of Self by David Wright, a 1987 Irish-published scholarly work, and an early copy of December Bride, the 1951 novel about rural Ulster by the Scots author Sam Hanna Bell. The loft had first editions of J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Augusta Gregory, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, and, slowly arriving, slim copies of the newer poets changing through their lives, Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland.
Maureen and Desmond Kenny began to sell books in 1940 just a year too late for Yeats to have bought from them. The earliest shop was a room in their first home, and the shop’s history is the chronicle of themselves, their sons and daughters. By the time I was taken to it, the shop was in High Street, Galway and was advertising itself very inventively with a huge poster of a three-level building in a snow-storm of books, all colours, shining windows and brilliant shelves. It was just like that. It glowed on the street among starry-windowed neighbours, close to a fourteenth century carved stone tavern, The Quays, a place of intense crowded hospitality and warmth. Woven baskets hung at the shop-door, not to sell, but as a hope of plenty in a town anciently of basket makers. Everywhere inside I could feel this splendid excess, more books than I could ever read or choose from, more paintings, more cards, booklets, paper for writing books on, notebooks for everyday and journals for leather-bound gold-tooled satin-ribbon perfect days to come. It was easy to long for time, endless time, to sit somewhere out of the way and look: to read and buy and read and leave, and return. In summer the sun crushed in too: in winter the books settled into their shelveries and except at Christmas, it was then a peaceful place.
Mrs Kenny herself sat by a small table, ready to chat, answer questions, and eagerly show you a book you could not begin to buy but longed to see. For me it was an edition of Ulster legends, The Tain, far beyond having, but here laid out for me, left with me on a side table, to look at, to be with for a while. She would be seventy in 1988, the year I first saw her, dressed in a brown jacket, her brown-white flowered skirt curving to the floor. She was all grace, an Irish woman with sons working beside her, a widow now in the shop she began with her young husband nearly fifty years before when there was only that little room in their house for a shop. Her husband Desmond sold from a stall at Galway Fair and travelled the countryside selling their books, buying more.
In time they added the art gallery beyond the bookshop, a strikingly light place for exhibitions: it opened out on to the white cloister of Middle Street. I recall a show of rugby action-paintings, collisions and swerves swirled into canvases in scarlet, green, yellow and black oil paint. At another time the space held tall white blocks, each with a bronze Cuchulainn or Fianna Warrior stark and poised in the white room.
There were medieval corners. Round to the left of the entrance, the floor curled under the old stair and formed a tiny chambre des livres, a little soft-angled place with cards on sale, book-plates: bookmarks silken, Samarkand and delicately corded: diaries, finds, trouvailles pocket-shaped and sized for gifts, little books on owls and hawks and unicorns.
The great stair was hung with drawings and photographs of all the master writers in Ireland, which is to say, in the world, who had come into the shop, and some who were alive too early to be here in person. There are hatted and thick-curled heads, splendid lofty faces, oblique glances, profiles, straightforward eyes, marvellous women. They climbed with me stage by stage to the first floor, to books on history revisited and retold, folklore, legends, poets early and modern, working in Irish and English, well known and lesser so – Francis Ledwige, Percy Field, alongside the great names: books on the magic West of Ireland – Tim Robinson on Connemara, John Synge on The Aran Islands. Writings on The Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and The Druid Players in Galway, plays by Oscar Wilde, Richard Sheridan, John Synge, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness . . .
Winding behind these lay the fiction section with framed cartoons and elegantly-printed comments and quotations. Antiquarian maps too and historical charters – so much to see. Books for children – anthologies of poetry for them as well as fiction and learning books. Huge enchanting picture books painted by John Burningham, gardens of yellow and red: bazaars and souks of colour by Brian Wildsmith, Maurice Sendak, strange, reticent, unsettling colourings by Chris Van Allsburg, Some steps above the Children’s Books, the stair rose into the Rare Book floor where we began. By now the photographs on the stair gallery were of modern writers, and in the loft room, recently photographed, my son as songwriter-poet-musician.
This room for rarest precious editions brought nearer the books I might hold but never possess, a sensation like the experience of faery dreamers with their lovers. But I have had my visions there: a first edition Yeats signed, an inscribed first edition Joyce. Was it there I saw a letter from Maud Gonne to Yeats? That may have been in Dublin, though, for there are other enchanted loft rooms where a book, a letter, is transfigured by time into a dream and changes into more than itself.
In September 2005, Kenny’s moved from High Street, Galway to a site outside the city to become an on-line business. Desmond Kenny has lately begun a bookshop within their base, and started a Gallery there too with his family. Mrs Kenny died in 2007: her children carry on her name and the history she made.
I send for books, pay in silence on line: but the book comes in and is real then, though from whom or by whose hand, I can never know. It is legend of a different kind: a supplication and an answer.
18. The Atlantis Bookshop, London:
A Light to Shine Before
Plato’s mariners remembered all their days how the island of Atlantis shone, how the temples were garnished with silver pinnacled in gold, all ivory and gold within, and orichalcum, copper to gleam. Like all magical places it was rounded with trial and places of endeavour.
Landfall at The Atlantis Bookshop in Museum Street, London is also made after spells in spaces of transformation. First there is the map-shop Imago Mundi whose window is richly coloured with 15th and 17th century maps. We need to go close to study them. The seas are made of parchment and creatures. The land is all red sinews and muscle-mass, the human body realised as its world. There are shapes in the air on those maps whose earths are younger than ours, and we almost know them. What world do we travel in an ancient map? What language do we speak? Who are our children?
Across the street, the Cartoon Museum is featuring Heath Robinson. Like medieval puzzles, his labyrinths of string are drawn meticulously on white paper and play out slow transformations into vast and interweaving clarity and solutions, ways to be found through the knot work. He is Ariadne to our Theseus taking us through
the maze. Nothing asserts here: everything evolves.
The British Museum nearby holds its invisible ancient powers and its Egyptian Hero gods within wide gardens as vista stop to this small street where half way along, I see the Atlantis Bookshop shining sea blue. Across the window are written OCCULT BOOKSHOP MAGIC and beyond the glass the lights are gold. I have made my landfall.
Just inside stands Thoth, the ibis-headed god who created himself through the power of language, of words: who invented writing and created magic, a same gift. He may be also Hermes, the messenger of the gods and their recorder. He may be the Questioner of the Dead who weighs the soul of each against a feather in a scale. He is speaker and writer. Today, colour streams on him from the books on the centre shelves. There is light from the ceiling, from sconces, from lamps, from gleaming picture-glass. At the far wall a desk is weighted with papers and books docketed with markers. The owner is seated there. She is brightly dressed and smiling. What world is this I’ve found?
I have a commission to carry through – to buy some books for my son. One or two will be ordered: the others are here. I watch as they are found, a series from Tartarus Press, uniform in a livery of pale matt cream. They are long and slim and come to the desk like tablets from Byzantium. Beside me is a fireplace and above that an old, big, mirror hangs. The books on the mantelpiece are not deep, to match its width: a little journal, reflections on Angels, some poetry, three neat leather-bound travel books on Egypt.
The tables and shelves are rich in books about telling. Here are Myths, tales of Superstition, of dreams and visitations. Some elegant and diagrammed books on Magic stare outward like Arch Mages, some chunky volumes about Magic are tucked companionably along the shelf. The Book of English Magic is beautifully eerily northern and pale. What will be different about English Magic? I look at James Frazer’s The Golden Bough in three editions, each cover alive with the artist’s imagination, his own deep dreaming.
