Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  From the outskirts, Dublin seemed like a fairy-tale city, with its necklace of lights lending a pink flush to the sky that paled the farther one moved from it. We had gone there by bus, Peter Abelard and I. I think it was clear that it was to be the night when something momentous would happen. I had first set eyes on him in a newspaper office, where I went again and again with articles, in the hope that one might be accepted. Through the long plate-glass window in the newsroom I could see the journalists at work, and he seemed the most thoughtful, his eyes always lowered and his eyelashes long and sandy. In secret I had called him Peter Abelard, who for the love of Héloise had been castrated by the medieval clerics of Cluny.

  Then one night I had occasion to speak to him. An article of mine had been accepted by the women’s page of the paper. It was about a seaside resort as yet undiscovered. I had gone there and simply wrote down what I saw, the big waves, green and vaulting, and the long spit of wet yellow sand and a lonely-looking tower in the distance. My pride in having it accepted was very great, knowing that people at home would read it and that my mother might forgive me my literary aspirations. On my way from pharmaceutical lectures, I had gone to collect the guinea that was due to me and which the editor said I would find on her desk. There to my delight was the warm sheet of newspaper, the ink still wet on it: “Portrane has not yet been discovered,” but instead of my name, it was my sister’s. Deprived of my moment of glory, I went into the corridor to search for an editor, a subeditor, anyone who could right this wrong. I could see them all through a window, editors and compositors, all at work, Peter Abelard among them. He saw me wave the page, somewhat agitated, and came out. He took it and withdrew into an inner room, and after some time returned, my own name now in bold, black print on the heading. He asked if I might like a drink sometime and we met in a pub in Drumcondra on three occasions, hands touching one another under the table, and the whiskey, to which I was not accustomed, like fire in my gut. One evening the friendly girl behind the counter who got to know us asked if we were getting engaged and he smiled the most beautiful, inscrutable smile.

  Extract from a weekly column for a railway magazine, early ’50s.

  Having got off the bus, we went through a gateway and into a field, then along the side of the field and down into a hollow, where, under a clump of low-hanging trees, he spread his raincoat on the dampish grass. As he took my hand, to help me down, I thought how chivalrous it was, and saw that he too was shy. This giving of myself had assumed a primordial importance, but soon my musings were cut short. Peter Abelard, with his trousers down, was about to make love to me, and it was too late to say “I want to know you better” or “I want to talk” or “Can we put our clothes on and go back to the road?” Most of all, I wanted the magic syllables of “I love you” to be said there in a field that I would never know the name of.

  My gaze inclined upward. Branches and tiny twigs, so placid against the night sky. The first thrust broke the phantasm of love, but my reasoning, which was somewhat askew, was that this brutish initiation had to be gone through in order to set us on the true path of love. I clutched at the thin grass and looked up at the few stars, wan and isolated, and thought that there would be happier lodgings and starry nights, and did all I could to stifle the sobbing. Soon that sobbing was stifled even more by his cries, which cut through the surrounding hush of the night. I asked him to hold me, and he did. Then in a while we stood up, each looking for a tree to lean on, silent as we put our clothes back on.

  Later, in an upstairs room of a pub which was a distance away, we sat at a folding table, hinged to the wall. We were alone. Either I was too constrained to eat or else too concerned that Peter Abelard might not be able to afford two dinners. As I drank tea, I watched him cut away a rim of fat from a large chop and then commence to eat it, along with boiled potatoes and peas, which were served in an egg saucepan. The peas kept slipping off his fork, and this seemed to annoy him slightly. I was convinced, though I would never know, that the love he had intimated in Drumcondra, and the literary link between us, was no more. Since he worked in the newspaper, he saw all the novels that came in from overseas before they were banned, and I inquired about Alberto Moravia’s The Conformist, which was deemed an offense to the Irish nation. But Peter Abelard was disinclined to talk. Two words kept repeating themselves to me—maidenhead and maidenfern, words that sounded the same and were so very different. Maidenhead, “a membrane that was the entrance to the gate of woman,” and maidenfern, “a plant with capillary leaves.” I remembered that in the bookshop I’d read half a play, La Celestina—The Spanish Bawd, where a defiant woman employed her time mending maidenheads, so that future swains would be foolish enough “to get mixed up in their skirts again.” But that was Salamanca in 1502 and this was Dublin in the 1950s.

  We took the bus back into the city and parted casually at the terminus. It was only walking home that I began to relive it, moment by moment, but other, lesser things kept intruding, such as the damp of the grass, a diamanté hair slide I had lost, the peas that kept slipping off his fork, his blond eyelashes, his beautiful priestly voice, which, were he not such a sinner, could enthrall congregations in Cluny or Paris or Salamanca. Getting closer to our digs, I got the wind up, fearing my sister and Anna would sense this vast change in me. They were already suspicious, believing that I was falling into wanton ways, wondering, Why a gentleman’s dress scarf, unless it was for gallivanting? Moreover, the late hour would need some explaining, but that was nothing to the explaining that I would have to do to myself. When I got in, I would soak my knickers in a basin of cold water with bleach, and bleach all the evidence away.

  The following Saturday night, after work, I cycled to a church on the Quays, hoping that the priest there would be more lenient than the demon in the Church of the Most Precious Blood in Cabra. I thought of my own blood on the bit of field that cows would sniff at. In the privacy of the confessional I gave a sketchy account of my “fall,” whereupon he raised himself up, his bulbous cheeks flush against the narrow grille, saying that there was no muffling of this sin, this loathsome sin, which must be confessed in full to God and to his ministers. As it came out in shaming snatches, it seemed even more loathsome, and he seethed with anger. I thought the partition between us would give way. He then asked how sorry was I for my sin and did I acknowledge that Christ, the Fisher of Souls, would have to fish me out from the pestiferous, vile, slime-ridden pool of transgression? He reminded me then that there could be no salvation, no fishing out, unless my atonement was utter and I resolved henceforth to avoid the sin that in the hierarchy of sins was the most damnable of all. He asked if marriage had been discussed, and fearing repercussions, I said that the man had gone to England leaving no address. The penance he gave me was astronomical, decade upon decade of the rosary, daily Mass and Holy Communion, which I knew to be out of the question, as I had to be in the chemist’s shop by eight-thirty. I came out of that confessional box completely confounded, eyes glaring at me as to why I was so long in there. Knowing that I had told him a lie about Peter Abelard scooting to England, I would now have to go to another church on the Quays (there were five of them) in order to get a second Absolution for the Holy Communions that I was to receive.

  Despite the fiasco in the field, I sent Peter Abelard the one book that I treasured, The Charwoman’s Daughter, by James Stephens, which Paschal insisted that I keep. On the flyleaf and to create a mature effect, I had copied a line of scripture, which Peter Abelard had spoken in the pub in Drumcondra: “Honey seems bitter to them that are sick with the jaundice.”

  It was not until November, the month of the suffering souls, that he rang the chemist’s shop and invited me to Sunday lunch with his wife and children. There were toys and a tricycle thrown down on the gravel, and even though it was winter, the hall door was wide open. The inside was a bit ramshackle. What has stayed in my memory is his sharpening the carving knife on the stone ledge of the kitchen window and then with aplomb carving th
e roast. It was five months since I had seen him, and he barely looked at me; his eyes were the same guarded blue that I had fallen in love with. After the lunch he took his jacket from the hook on the back of the door, since he had to go to work, and his wife asked me to stay behind. It was then I quaked, thinking she was going to question me, but she didn’t. All she said was that they had been childhood sweethearts and that no one would ever come between them. She was a thin woman with freckles, and on that Sunday she seemed in command of things, getting her children to eat up and asking at what hour might she expect him home.

  Then one day she rang the chemist’s shop and asked me to come and see her. I went there, believing she had found out, but it was not that at all. He had fallen in love. She learned of it because, when searching his pockets, she found various epiphanies extolling this new love, which had come as such a shock to him. Winnowing out the excessive words, he wrote draft after draft, until he had found the perfect one: “After that dark woman, you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.” She produced a bottle of sherry that had been there since Christmas, and we drank tumblers of it; then in her grief she cracked the empty bottle to pieces on the porcelain of the kitchen sink, repeating the words that had eaten into her, “After that dark woman, you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.”

  I could not tell her of my deception, and instead, to prove my somewhat dubious loyalty, I went into embattled verse.

  Oh dark woman

  With a shawl and ribs

  I could have served him better

  With my shanties.

  But men do love the shimmer

  And so his ghost

  Is hacked in half between us

  The dark me and the dark you.

  I had made a new friend, Rory, who worked in the Palace Bar next to the Irish Times where the literati came.

  “Ah, Boccaccio isn’t in it,” he would say, recounting everything he overheard, improvised poems and odes and the fact that a man called Alan C. Breeze had returned from England with a set of false teeth, which he claimed to have belonged to T. S. Eliot. But that was nothing compared with the conversation that ranged each night from matutines and nocturnes, to syllogisms, spondees, dactyls, the intrusive apostrophe, the broken lines of Virgil, and Aristotle’s tabula rasa. According to Rory there were two kinds of drinkers, the loquacious ones out of Joyce and the quiet ones out of Beckett, the Belacquas, solitary men, precursors of Krapp, beholding a pint, “drowned in dreams and burning to be gone.”

  The savants spoke in alexandrines (whatever they were) and threw quips of Greek and Latin at one another, drank “Niagarously,” the toast being “I drink to the thirst to come.” Mr. Smiley, the editor, in a green sombrero hat and canary waistcoat, would arrive around ten at night, sometimes singing parts of the leader article, which he would later polish, brushing aside hangers-on with “Out of my way, pismires, warlocks, stand aside.” Rory said the nail of Mr. Smiley’s finger was pared to exactly resemble the nib of the pen that had belonged to Keats. Around him in the private snug were his cohorts, his few favorite journalists, including Roger Casement’s brother, Tom, who was the somewhat dilatory chess correspondent for the paper. The two geniuses were the poet Patrick Kavanagh and the author Flann O’Brien, who also wrote a column for the Irish Times under the name of Myles na gCopaleen, where, according to himself, “the meek and tireless music of his quill set down on parchment the goings-on in the country.” Meek he was not, but with a rapier wit he mocked the Dublin Corporation, the wife, the Civil Service (of which he was, surprisingly, a servant), bicyclists, the Abbey Theatre, insurance fellas, and the plain people of Ireland, otherwise known as “Godridden gobdaws and galopes.”

  Cartoon of the all-male Dublin literati in a hostelry, 1940.

  Patrick Kavanagh, with the Monahan hills and the twisted boughs still in his veins, claimed that unless the clay was in the mouth, the singer’s singing was no good. It was hard, as Rory said, to connect the man with the poet. The poet had written evocative lines such as:

  Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal

  Pouring redemption for me, that I do

  The will of God

  Yet the man could be boorish. He had made a date with a lady to have tea in the Gresham Hotel, a spinster who lived in the Midlands and a devotee of his poetry. A shy man in his gruff way, he decided to bring along a few bowsies to liven the conversation. From behind a screen and some tall castor oil plants, they spotted her, by herself, mousy, with a knitted cap and matching knitted mittens. With ne’er a word, they retreated, back out into the street, Kavanagh buck-leaping, saying, “That craythur would never crack a man’s thighs.”

  Their lives, as their friend John Ryan wrote in his beautiful memoir, Remembering How We Stood, were shambolical. Kavanagh, “in wifeless existence,” had a bedsit in Pembroke Street, the bath full to the brim with empty sardine tins, the salon with a typewriter and secondhand chesterfield suite, and attached to the window a rear mirror, stolen from a lorry, by which he could appraise welcome or unwelcome callers. One night shortly before Christmas, and to the amazement of all Dublin, Archbishop McQuaid, “honouring the holy condition of poverty,” decided to call on the poet. It so happened that Kavanagh was entertaining a “lady of the night,” so that the monsignor, who came up to say the archbishop was about to follow, had to be discouraged with sundry excuses, such as the condition of the room and the lavatory not fixed. The poet did, however, agree to go down and meet the archbishop, and came away with a hand-knitted sweater, a bottle of Power’s Gold Label, and two hundred Sweet Afton cigarettes.

  His daily routine was unvarying. Up at dawn, when he might compose a few lines, then off out to get the newspaper to study the racing form, a quick malt in some nearby lounge, a bus to Grafton Street, to McDaids, his favorite haunt, down to the bookies, and back to the bar at fifteen-minute intervals, all of it made possible by his surprising good luck at backing winners, mainly outsiders. In the evening he would make the journey to the pub, where Mr. Smiley presided and where Rory was witness to Kavanagh’s bouts of silence or fury. When Louis MacNeice, who lived in London, dared to breach their circle, Kavanagh mocked him, singing, “Let yez go back and labor for Faber and Faber,” to the tune of “The Bard of Armagh,” the evening descending into blows between rival poets and their foot soldiers.

  Joyce was constantly spoken of in these circles, and not always favorably. Granted he had his epiphanies, but his work was full of smut and he had looked through a “gloss” darkly. Moreover, a lot of his stuff was shamelessly cogged from Thom’s Street Directory. Myles, when asked if he resembled Joyce, would say “that nothing could be further from Detroit,” and that Finnegans Wake was a “wallet of literary underwear.” That book, along with Gone with the Wind, were the two that he started five times and couldn’t finish. His harshest gibes, however, were for the Prairie professors, Americans, talking through their “caubs” and descending on Dublin to write their theses on Herr Joyce, comparing the key motif in the Ithaca section with the door lock at No. 7 Eccles Street, in homage to Mr. and Mrs. Bloom.

  I went for the first time to the Abbey Theatre with Paschal, the retired guard, and stood in the lobby, giddy at the thought that Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge had once stood in that same place. The play was Cathleen Ni Houlihan by Yeats, and Siobhán McKenna played Cathleen, the lamenting woman, the embodiment of Ireland, who was recruiting young men to fight for her cause. It was mesmerizing. I decided, there and then, to forsake the path of writing for that of the stage and remembered my wan attempt to join the Travelling Company, which had played Dracula. But now I was more determined.

  Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammoir ran the Gate Theatre and were two of the most scandalous figures in Dublin. I had not seen them onstage, but I had the good luck to be at a bus stop once, where, to everyone’s amazement, Michael joined the queue. He was like a demigod, in a voluminous cloak, fully ma
de up, and wearing an auburn wig, exuding an air of theatricality and replying in a velvety voice to a woman who was showering him with compliments. By what devious means I got his home address, I cannot recall, but I still have the postcard telling me that I may come to No. 4 Harcourt Terrace at 11:30 a.m. on a particular Sunday.

  Theirs would be the first theatrical house I ever set foot in. It was exotic. A red chaise longue, the dark violet wallpaper with a tracery of plumage, framed posters and photographs of the two actors in their various costumes, their eyes evil and dark as molasses, their eyebrows roguish. No matter where I walked in that room, Michael MacLiammoir’s eyes followed me from every conceivable corner. I was jittery. In he swept, again fully made up and wearing a flowered silk kimono, which went just below his knees, the serge of the trousers prosaic by contrast.

  The lines I had chosen were that of the old woman in Cathleen Ni Houlihan who went from house to house, recruiting young men to die for Ireland, lines that Siobhán McKenna had spoken with such conviction and such feeling:

  Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to walk the hills and the bogs and the rushes will be sent to walk hard streets in far countries; many a good plan will be broken; many a child will be born and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name.

  I murdered those lines. It would not have been surprising, what with my untoward and reckless gesturing, to see pictures slide off the walls or decanters wobble on the silver trays on which they stood. He endured most of it and then, with a staying hand and a surprising gentleness, said that he believed I was descended from one of the great, ancient Galway tribes and, excusing himself, hoped that I would be able to find my way out.

  Coming out into the daylight, I felt crushed, believing that life was a gray road, an unending literary limbo, where I would never reach the Parnassian heights that, in daftness, I had aspired to.