I Can't Stay Long

by Laurie Lee

  Sheamus trotted the mare up and down the lane, running like a frisky boy beside her. She was not right for Sean, but the brothers were not dismayed. They knew of another farther along the cliffs. ‘I didn’t see him move, but I saw him standing by the sea with his head up and a great star on his forehead. A terrible great horse he looked to be. I’d be ashamed not to tell you the truth.’

  They said they’d take us to see him. We drove off up the cliff with Sheamus’ bicycle on the hood of the car. The brothers in the back shouted, ‘Lovely! Lovely!’ Then the car broke down in the bog.

  We abandoned the thing and took to our legs, an hour’s walk above Galway Bay, the brothers waving their arms and rolling about the rocks, intoxicated by the wind and by Sunday leisure. Ringing political arguments began to rise between them, debating the worth of old Irish leaders. ‘He was the man of his time. I tell you true. All the great men now are dead.’ ‘But when the blaze came to his bottom he minded himself.’ ‘Hold away now! Have ye finished? Listen! …’ They roared at each other like a couple of seals, building up passions of rhetorical insult. They jumped up and down, and threw their caps in the mud. Agreement would have murdered the afternoon.

  We found the horse on the cliff edge – a mighty wind-blown beast with the whole of Connemara framed by his legs. But the farmer’s price was too stiff, so, not to waste the day, Sheamus started bidding for a couple of heifers. The ritual of bargaining was long and elaborate; there was still half Sunday left to use. Sheamus offered a price. The farmer wouldn’t think of it, the heifers were not for sale. ‘Forty-one, I’m offering.’ ‘Forty-five wouldn’t buy them.’ They used the whole landscape to stamp away from each other. We fetched them back. ‘Are they my heifers now?’ ‘They are – at forty-five.’ An hour later we were still at it, tramping up and down the cliff, supporting the struggling pair. Neither would yield, and no deal was made, but the negotiations had been fine and subtle.

  It was the brothers at last who pulled the car from the bog and dragged it lifeless back to the village. They sent out their daughters to find a man to repair it and steered us away for some evening drinking. Sheamus’ face was now red as a Bengal cock. His eyes clouded and shone with the past. Remembering the horses he’s known, and his poor old father, and the hungry times they’d had, cutting a winter’s peat for thirty shillings and eating bread dipped in river water. And the best day of his life – watching a twelve-year-old girl jumping one of his unbroken Galway hunters, taking it over the wall like a flying lion: ‘The tears laid on my eyes to see her.’

  We’d arrived as strangers, but we’d developed the day with the brothers, and they were now proud and protective with us. They pointed to Sean: ‘Look at the arms upon him.’ I, too, was Irish; it was running out of my ears. And had we ever in our lives seen a bay like Galway? – ‘And the sun there, dropping, dropping …’

  The pub in Ireland is still a kind of chapel of ease and shows the Irishman on top of his time. The television, for instance, will usually be kept in a small back room and will be killed when a man is talking. The pub is no place for lone drinking, or solitary introspection, but a public chamber in which to make yourself heard.

  I remember a particular night, in Hogan’s Bar, Ennis, a few doorways from The Old Ground Hotel. There was a squat, nimble fiddler from the Spancehill horse fair and a pale piper as thin as his flute. It was early, but already, behind their long black pints, the men of Clare were clearing their throats. What followed was typical of other bars I went to, up in Galway, down in Kerry and Cork – something halfway between a wake and a wedding, half celebration, half common grief.

  The fiddler began with some horse-fair reels, then the piper took his turn. ‘A sad gigue,’ he announced, ‘to banish misfortune’; and his little flute made the cries of sea birds. Then one by one, as the finger pointed, each man in the bar sang a ballad: old men, with the slurred incantations of bards, young men with hot fruity tenors, each singing, eyes closed, reaching back in his mind, songs which smelt of the very skin of Ireland.

  This was not the boozy wail of the usual pub singsong, but a haunting restatement of identity. ‘The ballads of Ireland,’ said someone, ‘tell the whole of its history. They are the jigsaw of three thousand years.’ The songs I heard that night were heard in silence, or with little murmurs of approval. And they were almost all of them cries of loss – lost love, a lost cause, the loss of Ireland itself, parting, departure, death. To be born was to die, but the Irish died twice, for exile was another death. ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, ‘Fare Thee Well, Enniskillen’, ‘Spanish Lady’, ‘Raise the Gallows High’; they had that bite and melancholy at the heart of all folk song, celebrating a beauty too brief to bear.

  The night was long and deep; everyone took his turn; and not even I, the stranger, was spared. A fiddle was put in my hand, I leaned against the bar and played the only Irish lament I knew. The old fiddle was the sweetest I’d ever touched, and my performance was airborne with whisky. When I finished, an old man struck the bar with his cap. ‘Englishman,’ he said, ‘we forgive you.’

  There is small distance in Ireland between the cultural classes, between the pub and the National Library. Irish literature is less for the sit-down man than for the stand-up singer and actor. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, O’Casey, wrote their best for the living voice.

  I met a man in Kerry who keeps a small-town pub and is now one of the best playwrights in Ireland. J. B. Keane succeeds Behan, but with less of his one-man violence, and perhaps less of his self-destruction. I found him sharp as a gypsy, and without self-grandeur, and with a sly love for his Kerry countrymen.

  Keane sent me to Cork to see his play, The Highest House on the Mountain, performed by a small local company with a large reputation, in a church hall, down a narrow side street. The night was pelting with rain, and the theatre packed, and the play a swinging flight of wit and compassion. Irish as the hills, and full of cavernous undertones, it rocked halfway between the bogs and heaven. The production was on a level with those of The Abbey, Dublin – though Dublin may not admit it.

  As for Cork itself, it is bright and alive, full of bridges and branching rivers, provincial, yet open to the airs of the world, its waters haunted by Atlantic liners. The deep-wooded creeks round Cobh and Kinsale are whitened by yachts and herons, and the green hills above them were often the last sight of Ireland for exiles bound for America.

  From Cork I took a fast new train through the country to wind up my trip in Dublin. Dublin is as Irish as New York is America, and has been called the most beautiful city in Europe. Largely built by the English as a place of privilege and grace, it is a city of elegant squares and terraces, houses of toast-warm brick, set with exquisite doors and balconies, recalling the Georgian grandeurs of Bath and Cheltenham. For nearly two hundred years it was a coiled jewel on the Liffey – but the new builders have come at last, and what they are doing to the terraces is like replacing pearls in a necklace with a succession of iron bolts.

  Dublin, even so, is still a meeting place, and a town where there is place to talk. I spent two hot days in the company of Dubliner poets, riding their verbal streams; listening to the ballad singers of Howth, keening through stout and tobacco smoke; to tragi-comical tales of The Troubles; being led over bridges from bar to bar, where every ‘snug’ had a literary memory, and the last words of heroes hung like bells in the air, and every drinker straightened up to ring them.

  Dublin struck me as a neutral drug-city for exiles, where dreamers gather to remember Ireland. And it was only here, gazing down into the slow brown Liffey, that I was able to look back on my own short journey.

  I had travelled eight counties, and stayed in every kind of hotel, from princely ‘Dromoland’ to a hovel in Dingle. I remembered sea trout in Cork, sprawling over my plate, as huge as a boxer’s arm; homemade bread up in Galway, light as a honeycomb; fat Dublin Bay prawns at Jammet’s … But I was remembering, too, the great hills in the west, where man seemed only a
tenant. The long, stone fields, the cottages like hives, the old tombs of kings by the sea. And the green of the country, ‘the forty kinds of green’, fired or damped by every shade of weather, from an electric brilliance to something deep and cold as the eyes of a witch’s cat.

  I recalled the long, empty roads, a man and a horse upon them; the tinkers with hair like thistles; the sound of carts in the villages – the rattle of wheel and harness; the smell of rain on the burning turf. There were the old men on donkeys with the faces of American senators, others looking like New York cops.

  This was a country of horses, of blacksmiths hammering, working dogs, children getting in the hay; of pink-cheeked young priests walking alone by the rivers, unwed girls staring across the fields. And ruins everywhere: great abbeys, castles, cottages abandoned, the black thumb of Cromwell – the marginal brandmarks of the country’s history, worn like wounds, and never forgotten.

  Ireland is constant, but the Irish move; they have put no great mark on their land. They seem to inhabit its surfaces as birds ride on the sea, coming and going with wind-blown cries. As near to it in heart as any men to their birthplace, perhaps they are more conscious of their hopeless impermanence. Meanwhile, they fill it with their voices, and keep its memory green, singing their farewells up and down its valleys.

  Arrack and Astarte

  I was in Beirut, briefly, once before, when I landed on a flight from Cairo to Cyprus, in May 1945. A sad mechanic walked across the scrubby air-strip and waited as we refuelled. Then he said to the pilot: ‘Bring me back a bride, will you?’ and handed him a bunch of bananas through the open cockpit.

  Cyprus – seventy miles westward over the edge of the sea – was long famed for the beauty and compliance of its women: since classical times it had been the sacred island of love, the birthplace of Venus rising from the dawn-pink sea.

  Venus, in fact, was an early immigrant to Cyprus. The original love-goddess, under her various names, had her home in the hill-caves of Syria and the Lebanon. Did the forlorn Beirut mechanic, in those hard end-of-the-war days, feel his city and land deprived of its pagan birthright?

  He need not have worried. When I returned, years later, to booming Beirut, I found it transformed, magnificently re-risen from the sea, and splendidly balanced on its old trident of wealth, pleasure and sensuality.

  Beirut, packed tight on its western-facing peninsula, has been a trading sea-port for some five thousand years. ‘A sore thumb sticking out in the wrong direction,’ is also what some cynical desert-Arabs call it. Nevertheless it must be unique in its throbbing energy, in its concentration of diverse faiths and cultures, moreover in its unusual achievement of general tolerance which makes it one of the most successfully Western cities of the Middle East.

  It is also very rich. Flying in through the gold-mist of sunset, you suddenly see below you, crowding the peninsula and round the bay, gold slabs of apartments, offices and new hotels – a kind of Fort Knox of well-stacked affluence. It is saved, perhaps, from the total hell of urbanization, by the villas that trail away steeply to the clouded mountains. One soon learns to enjoy the shades of difference between Beirut and its environs – the public, money-making, pleasure-domed city, and the quiet villas on the hills, their terraced arches clotted with the reflections of sunsets, turning them the colour of old Syrian glass.

  Beirut is not, as one might expect, an oriental city. Although ridden for centuries by Muslim invaders, by the Ottoman Empire and the Mamelukes, it is predominantly Western in wit, social styles, material success, and in its guiltless pursuit of pleasure.

  Perhaps this had to be so. For since its beginnings, Beirut has stood in the centre of a narrow strip of land running north-south between sea and mountains – a trampling ground for the armies of clashing civilizations: Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Macedonian, Roman, Mongol and Turk.

  No doubt it was the early presence of Greek and Roman, tempered later by that of the easy-going Muslim, which developed Beirut’s partiality for humanism and law. Equally, it must have been its position as a trade centre, beach-head between Asia and the West, temporary territory for advancing and fleeing armies, which taught its diverse peoples, many of them permanently displaced by events, to settle and live peacefully together.

  For scattered throughout the city, and scrupulously represented in the legislature of the country, are almost a dozen different faiths, including Maronite Christians, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics, Sunni Muslims, Shi’ite Muslims, Protestants, Presbyterians, and the Druzes. The Maronites – the majority – are the survivors of an eighth-century heresy; the faith of the indiginous Druzes is tribal and secret.

  Clearly, this boiling diversity of peoples is one of the sources of Beirut’s effervescence, and you get the feel of this as soon as you arrive. Driving in from the airfield, for instance, my progress was intermittently arrested, not only by the taxi-driver’s personal eccentricities, but severally by an 80-mile-an-hour motor rally, a parade of nuns, a television crew filming a mid-street commercial, a marching brass band, a concentration of football fans, and a friendly riot round the flower-decked car of a newly-elected deputy who was celebrating with a bleeding nose.

  My hotel, The Mayflower, was one of modest luxury, with a relaxed and civilized atmosphere. The proprietor, a handsome Anglicized Lebanese, loved the British way of life without being too rigid about it. Not only, for instance, could one have a lush English breakfast in the morning, one could also have a hot meal in one’s room at midnight. Built into the hotel, there is also The Duke of Wellington – the proprietor’s dream of an English pub. The barmen wear bow-ties and tartan jackets. British-brewed beer cost about 40p a pint.

  The Mayflower stands in the Ras Beirut, a mainly English-speaking area, American-educated, brashly commercial, and much of it newly built. Flats, shops and cinemas, hotels and banks, even an outbreak of sidewalk cafés, all stand jumbled together like a millionaire’s playbox. The hundred-year-old American University lies aloofly to the north.

  I stepped out of The Mayflower, on my first evening there, and breathed a temperature 30 degrees warmer than London. The narrow streets were full of hoots, squeals, thumps and bangs as motor-cars bounced off each other. Some cut across pavements as they took the short way round corners. Bluff and quick-thinking sustained the anarchic flow. There seemed to be few pedestrians abroad, except in the wider boulevards; you travelled by motor-car as the only means of protection. For visitors, in any case, getting a taxi was no problem; you simply took one or two steps along the pavement and one pulled up silently beside you.

  A system of ‘service’ taxis criss-cross Beirut and are the best and cheapest way of getting around. They follow a fixed route, charge a flat rate, and can be hailed like a bus. You take an ordinary taxi for a private journey, and the fare must be arranged in advance. But once you’ve agreed on a price you get something extra – a multilingual driver who becomes your guide, confessor, body-guard and initiator; one who will suggest where you should go but will not insist; who will follow your whims to the end, will protect you from false temptations and all the perils of the night, and will even see you home safely to bed.

  Whether I wished, that first evening, to walk or to hire a taxi, was a decision that was quickly taken for me. I had scarcely left my hotel when I was aware of a fellow walking beside me, his hand buried deep in my jacket pocket. No threats. Perfectly friendly. Just: ‘Whayawant, mistah? Boy? – girl? Gimme a beer. I take you.’ I double-shuffled in reverse. A taxi slid to my elbow. I jumped in, closed the door, and escaped.

  The driver introduced himself as ‘Jack,’ sang in Arabic as we drove, cursed other drivers in American, and asked me my wishes in French. To taste the edge of sin in my district we dipped into several second-grade Hambra night-clubs, but it was too early and nothing much was happening. A bottle of beer at the bar cost about 75p, but one was not compelled to drink alone. Each club had on offer a range of spectacular girls whose company and co
nversation were available at champagne prices. They all seemed to be called Trudi, Heidi, or Judy. I met none who was Lebanese.

  It soon becomes clear to the visitor that the attitude of the citizens of Beirut to their city is a peculiarly schizoid one. It is their pleasure-ground and their source of wealth; with one hand they caress it, with the other mutilate it for gain. During the First World War the Turks destroyed much of old Beirut; after which many new town-houses were erected bearing a kind of French-Lebanese imprint – lightly arcaded, cool and charming. Throughout the past ten years – with the coming of the land-developer’s high crane and excavator – most of these eggshell structures have been systematically crushed to make room for the international concrete block. Most rich families in the Lebanon own some such new property in Beirut, not necessarily to live in – mainly for speculation. Perhaps they boast one of the city’s three hundred hotels, or one or two of the seventy-odd banks; or, if really chic, a block of high-rise flats. As the city has spread, you see these bright new apartment houses standing marooned on bits of waste ground. From the air they look rudimentary, like gold-miners’ stakes. A number of them are empty, some built by oil-sheiks from the Gulf largely as funk-holes set against times of trouble. Not all the latter are entirely empty, however; in the echoing edifices of some an oil-sheik will have installed a blonde ‘Doris’ from Leeds, or an even blonder ‘Ingrid’ from Malmö, to whom he and his brothers, arriving in their private jets, will pay regular and attentive visits.

  Beirut is where the money is – banking, import, export – but the dealers no longer have to live on the job. After work, in half an hour, they can escape to their villas in the hills and look down on their many-storied wealth – which may explain, in part, their guilty love of their city and also their physical abuse of it.