Ghost Light: A Novel

by Joseph O'Connor

  So now, my old Millington Thrillington Moppet – I am solitary in my bed and that sister of mine is off up some hayrick with her student, and I’d lay odds I know what it is they’re studying. Ho ho. And I have a famous piece of news entirely for Your Munificent Honour, which is that I wrote the scene of a play the other night. (Christ, it’s thundering now; a clap like a BOMB just sounded to the south.) What started it was this old suitcase I saw in a junkshop in Galway a couple of mornings before the Queen of Sheba and my self headed out here: just this battered old yoke full of some dead person’s belongings: old rosary beads and tickets and busted auld gewgaws and bits of almanacs and religious medals, and the docket from Ellis Island still pasted on the handle and a couple of dirty cents inside too. O Tramper, it was the saddest old suitcase a body ever saw. Well, all day the owner was in my head and who he must have been, or she. Anyways, I put an evening or two into making a play of it but then didn’t I get frustrated and threw the hat at it. So I tear it and say BAD WORDS to it and fling it into the wind, but wait till you hear what happened: next morning I was out in the currach with Mary and her brother Alec hauling lobster pots and didn’t I happen on a page of it in the water. As true as God! Soaked through, do you know, and the ink all smudged to buggery. But floating as though it wanted a last chance. So I fished it out anyways and into the apron pocket. And now it doesn’t seem actually sickening bad when I look at it again. I mean it doesn’t seem good. But it doesn’t seem bad. I might work on it a few nights and see if I can give it a kick. I’m thinking I’d call it SCENES FROM A HURRICANE.

  Do you reckon you might give it a read for me, my sagacious old nighthawk? The hero is a handsome man of the world and is inspired by yourself but I don’t know if that would tempt you? (Cunning, amn’t I?) Or maybe it would likelier put you off. (Ha ha.) It would be phantasmagorical of you to read it for I know you would tell me the truth of whether it is of any use, at all, or whether it is, conversely, a bucket of donkeypiss. Anyhow, the only reason I started it was you gave me the courage. And to tell you of my feelings. About you, I mean. For it touched something, that suitcase, took me a while to see what it was. Or maybe I just want to impress Your Bearded Eminence. How funny. Sure I won’t actually set it alight on the chance I might hear from you again some time, ever, in my whole life, how is that? Would you not run away with me to California and I’ll write it all up proper and play the whole thing to you some morning under a palm tree, in my nip? (Don’t be giving me your priestly looks! Don’t forget I know your secrets! O, it’s the quiet ones want watching, as my mother does say. Don’t you miss me at all, my naughty man? THEN WHY IN THE NAME OF GOD DON’T YOU WRITE TO ME?)

  Saints’ Mothers, it’s barrelling down now, the gale of all gales. I should rightly go to my sleep and quit plaguing you. You’d want to hear the creaks and groans out of the roof this minute – like the masts of a ship in a hurricane. Did you know the stagehands in Shakespeare’s time were sailors come home? Sally told me that. She has to know everything, of course. Sacred Heart, but it’s gone quarter to four in the morning. How did that happen? Why am I asking you questions? Do you know?

  I was thinking about when we quarrelled. You silly jealous lunk. I hate it when we quarrel. It makes me afraid you want to leave me. I’d no more go with another fellow – you are too silly a goose for words. I might play a little game of winks and bat my eyes but that is all. And I’ll quit if you really do wish me to. The thought I’d make you unhappy, you blethering baboon, when it’s myself is at your mercy and always will be.

  And I HATE it when you say I’d be better off with ‘some easygoing chap’. God it makes me want to scream the face off you, so it does. Some harmless nice fellow and his collars in a drawer and his mammy sewing him up for the winter. What would I do with him, when it’s my crabby auld scrivener I only want? You say it for the devilment of maddening me, don’t you?

  Didn’t I know it the moment I saw you, before you’d ever given me the time of day. Long before you ever touched me, or even I heard your name spoken. Girls’ nonsense, I hear you saying. Never happens in life. Only in storybooks and songs. And the queerest thing of all is: I agree with my Tramper. I haven’t hide nor hair of reasons for what’s between us now. And if ever you wanted to quit your impatient girl truly, and our little story had to be stored away in a room that’s only sometimes remembered, that’s still a room I’d want, and I’d go there now and again, like some room in an old hotel on a seafront someplace where two sinners did something they shouldn’t. Do you mind what I am telling you? It is the God’s honest truth. Even if I never saw you or heard from you again, you’d already have been the miracle of my life.

  I can see you rolling your seven-hundred-year-old eyes and saying I make it sound a novel for dressmakers, you bittermouthed aspish auld granny. But to find you in my mind at some moment of the morning, to see some sentence in a script and wonder what my Tramper would say to it, or to feel you glowing on like a lamp in my head and know I’d sleep in your arms that night. There’s nothing in the world would ever give me the joy of that. Nothing in the great round world.

  You’re forever at me to talk. Only I am sometimes afraid. The things I should have told you when we were walking Killiney Strand. Like that knowing you is the greatest blessing of anything in my life and I can’t think up the phrases and the fiery words you have yourself, for there’s not languages enough in all the living world to tell you of your preciousness to me. And everything about you gives me courage I never, ever had and without you I’m like a ghost drifting through some old house of a life and there’s nothing about you I don’t love. You are so kindly and good and wise and I love you and so patient and so loyal and so manly. So now you know all. Can I send you this letter? Are you reading it still? Am I mad?

  When we marry, can we go to America and stay there a time? That’s if you still want me, my ploughboy. Wouldn’t we be the nice pair of ornaments in New York or Brooklyn or someplace? To flit away from this rainy sadland and the gossips and the dullards and the pokers-of-noses and auld maids. There’s times I think it will choke us. If only we could go. We would live to a hundred and fifty! Do you think I could ever play a lead in New York or Chicago? O my Tramper, wouldn’t that be a pancake entirely. We’d be two fools with the laughter and we traipsing down the Broadway and back to some little flat in the midnight. It makes me weep with heart’s joy when I think I have found you, and all the lovers’ adventures we’ll share. Do you know the way I have sometimes wept when we have been together alone, for all the pleasures you have given me have left me nothing else to do? That is how I feel this night. How I wish I had you here. I would measure your neck with my kisses.

  God I can’t sleep tonight. What is ailing your girl? Do you mind you asked me one time to sing you a song and I was nervous for I hadn’t had lessons? It was the first day we ever spoke to one another – in Sackville Street – by the Post Office. But if you were here, I’d sing it now. Would you like that, old Millipede? Because the words on a page are only words on a page, but a song needs someone to love it by hearing. You told me that once; it was that night we were in Cork. An auld drunkard was singing it and not a soul of the world listening. But you and me were. And it’s in my head now. And as long as I live, and no matter what happens us, I’ll hear it every time I hear rain.

  The sun would dry the oceans wide;

  Heaven should cease to be.

  The world will cease its motion, my love.

  E’er I’d prove false to thee.

  Well, it’s coming on for dawn. I better go to sleep. Do you think I should send this, when you don’t want interrupting? You’re right: I shouldn’t. But tomorrow I’m going to. As soon as the storm is over.

  Whisht, I think it’s lulling. Wait now, till I listen. Everything is quiet. Only the waves on the stones. It’s little enough Irish I’ll be learning today I’m thinking.

  I can hear the terns calling. Beautiful sound. Come with me up to the cliff, and we’ll watch th
em an hour? We won’t say anything. Let the sea be all our talk. Just the gulls and the fishermen’s boats heading out, and the trawl-nets unrolling behind them.

  I kiss this paper, dear man. Touch it to your lips.

  I am half afraid to send it. I don’t know why. The sun is coming up.

  Your Changeling

  Also by Joseph O’Connor

  NOVELS

  Cowboys and Indians

  Desperadoes

  The Salesman

  Inishowen

  Star of the Sea

  Redemption Falls

  SHORT STORIES / NOVELLA

  True Believers

  The Comedian

  PLAYS

  Red Roses and Petrol

  The Weeping of Angels

  True Believers (adaptation)

  Handel’s Crossing

  FILM SCRIPTS

  A Stone of the Heart

  The Long Way Home

  Ailsa

  Acknowledgements and Caveat

  I grew up about a mile from the old house where John Synge and his mother had endured their last years, a house that appears several times in this novel. As a child, I passed it often, was faintly afraid of it, often wondered about the stories it had seen. I thought of it as a slightly decrepit embassy of literature, a headquarters where brave things had been attempted, some magnificently achieved, but also as a hermitage of ghosts. On a wintry day it could be forbidding as the Bates Motel, or as Wuthering Heights in a rainstorm. But on a summer evening in that coast town of seagulls and steeples, a strange beauty seemed to glitter from its windows. To my parents I owe an acknowledgement for their valuing of books, their unlocking of the doors to that house. I thank my father, Sean, for his loving solidarity and his affection for the written word’s possibilities. It was he who first brought me to a play, in Sallynoggin Parish Hall, an amateur production – I don’t remember the author – but I can still hear the wolf-whistles that arose from the audience when the leading lady was kissed by her suitor. I thank my stepmother, Viola, for her loyalty and care, her wise counsel over many years. And I remember my late mother, Marie O’Connor, née O’Grady, who like my heroine had been a dressmaker in her Dublin girlhood, for bequeathing me a fascination with Molly.

  It’s to my parents, too, that I owe an inherited memory of the Edwardian Dublin words spoken by some of the characters in the book. My father was born in Francis Street, in the oldest part of the city, The Liberties. (His mother, like my leading lady, was an O’Neill.) And I pay tribute to the work of Professor Terence Dolan at University College Dublin, whose Dictionary of Hiberno-English is a treasure-chest of glories, an acknowledgement that the common speech of any society is sometimes more nuanced than its art.

  Ghost Light is a work of fiction, frequently taking immense liberties with fact. The experiences and personalities of the real Molly and Synge differed from those of my characters in uncountable ways. Chronologies, geographies and portrayals appearing in this novel are not to be relied upon by the researcher. Synge and Molly did not holiday for a month unaccompanied in Wicklow; nor, so far as I know, did he express the wish to live in America. At least one meticulous scholar has contended that they had little or no sexual relationship. Synge’s mother was a more complicated person than my portrayal. Molly’s circumstances, although difficult in her later years, were not as depicted here. Most events in this book never happened at all. Certain biographers will want to beat me with a turf-shovel. Apologies to Yeatsians for my distortions of the great man and his works, and to scholars of Lady Gregory and Synge and Sean O’Casey. These giants often said they had fanned their fictions from the sparks of real life, renaming the people who had inspired their stories. The practice was sometimes a camouflage, sometimes a claim of authenticity. It was an option I considered carefully but decided against in the end, and so I dare to ask the forgiveness of these noble ghosts of world literature for not changing the names of the innocent.

  The letters purporting to be from Synge in chapters 1 and 2, and Molly’s love letter in the Epilogue, are entirely fictional. Other brief quotations from Synge’s letters are authentic and are included in Ann Saddlemyer, ed., Letters to Molly: John Millington Synge to Maire O’Neill, but as with all acts of quotation not made by the original author, context can subtly change meaning. The reader in search of reliable material is directed to the following works and to the useful notes or bibliographies they contain: Elizabeth Coxhead, ‘Sally and Molly: Sara Allgood and Maire O’Neill’ in Daughters of Erin; W.J. McCormack, Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge; Andrew Carpenter, ed., My Uncle John: Edward Stephens’s Life of J.M. Synge; R.F. Foster, ‘Good behaviour: Yeats, Synge and Anglo-Irish etiquette’, Anne Saddlemyer, ‘Synge’s soundscape’, and Declan Kiberd, ‘The making and unmaking of myth: Synge as anthropologist’ in Nicholas Grene, ed., Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School, 1991 – 2000. The song ‘Join the British Army’ is an old Dublin ballad and is taken from the singing of the late Luke Kelly. ‘My Bonnie Mary’ is by Robert Burns. ‘The Heights of Alma’ is a traditional Irish ballad celebrating Sergeant (later Major General) Luke O’Connor, who was born in Elphin, County Roscommon, and was a recipient of the Victoria Cross for his bravery in the Crimea. The author of the poem sung by JMS in chapter 7 is unknown. A version by Lady Gregory, titled ‘The Grief of a Girl’s Heart’, appears in her collection The Kiltartan Poetry Book and is used powerfully in John Huston’s film of James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’. Ardent Joyceans will have noticed that Molly’s cat utters the same sound as does Leopold Bloom’s in Ulysses, that a certain Dublin butcher may have had relatives in the London book trade, and a couple of other fleeting allusions. I thank the excellent librarians and archivists at the National Library of Ireland, at the New York Public Library, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Orchard Street, New York, and at Trinity College Dublin.

  My thanks also to my editor Geoff Mulligan, to Stuart Williams, Ellie Steel, and all at Harvill Secker and Vintage; to my literary agents Carole Blake and Conrad Williams at Blake Friedmann, London; to Jewerl Keats Ross, Silent R Management, Los Angeles; to my family, the O’Connors and Suiters and Caseys; to my friend Tony Roche for enduring my questions with such gentlemanly patience: he must be absolved from any blame for my departures from accuracy. It’s because of him that I know a little of what I departed from. Early versions of material in this novel first appeared in his Synge: A Celebration, and in my short story What Might Have Been, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York. While finishing this novel I spent some time at Hunter’s Hotel, Rathnew, County Wicklow, where one night I had a dream that there was an angel in the garden. If there was, I offer my admiration and gratitude. Ciaran Carty was the first editor to publish my fiction, on the Sunday Tribune’s ‘New Irish Writing’ page in 1989. The dedication of this novel to Ciaran, and to his wife, Julia, is utterly inadequate thanks for the affectionate support he has given to my generation of Irish writers. I thank Roslyn Bernstein, James McCarthy and my former students at Baruch College, the City University of New York, where I was Writer in Residence in 2009, and I thank Loretta Brennan-Glucksman, Eileen Reilly, John Waters and their colleagues at Glucksman Ireland House, NYU. Warm and affectionate thanks to Frances Coady and her colleagues at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Picador USA. My deepest loving thanks to Anne-Marie Casey, and to our sons James and Marcus, the best playboys.

  FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2010 by Joseph O’Connor

  All rights reserved Originally published in 2010 by Harvill Secker, Great Britain Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux First American edition, 2011

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the estate of Sylvia Plath for permission to quote from ‘For a Fatherless Son.’

  www.fsgbooks.com

  eISBN 9781429992282

  First eBook Edition
: January 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O’Connor, Joseph, 1963 –

  Ghost light / Joseph O’Connor.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Francis Coady Book.”

  “Originally published in 2010 by Harvill Secker, Great Britain”—T.p.

  verso.

  ISBN 978-0-374-16187-3 (alk. paper)

  1. O’Neill, Maire, 1887 – 1952—Fiction. 2. Synge, J. M. (John Millington), 1871 – 1909—Fiction. 3. Actresses—Ireland—Fiction. 4. Dramatists, Irish—Fiction. 5. Theater—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6065.C558G56 2011

  823’.914—dc22

  2010022672