The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  Now, nine years after his death, Yeats’ remains have been returned to Sligo. It was his own wish, the completion of a work long planned, the crowning of a life which was like some great work of art nobly conceived, nobly executed and here brought to a triumphant conclusion.

  Under bare Ben Bulben’s head

  In Drumcliffe churchyard Yeats is laid.…

  On limestone quarried near the spot

  By his command these words are cut:

  Cast a cold eye

  On life, on death.

  Horseman, pass by!

  As an epitaph it is all right, but as an epitaph on Yeats it is hard to think of anything more inappropriate. The lines of his by which I shall always remember him are those that haunted me all day after I had heard of his death:

  Strong sinew and soft flesh

  Are foliage round the shaft

  Before the arrowsmith

  Has stripped it; and I pray

  That I, all foliage gone,

  May shoot into my joy.

  The truth is that of all the men I have known there was none who cast a more eager eye on both life and death. He was a blazing enthusiast who, into his seventies, retained all the spontaneity and astonishment of a boy of seventeen. […]

  When we weren’t quarrelling, which was often enough, we usually got on well, because his adolescent eagerness, his passion for abstract conversation, was the sort of thing I had been used to when Sean O’Faolain and I were boys in Cork and made ourselves intellectually drunk over ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’, Keats and Shelley. We had long, excited and very muddled arguments about Hegelianism, Fascism, Communism, pacifism; and sometimes the clash of ideas would release the lightning of phrase or anecdote, always perfectly apt. Once when I quoted the remark of an Irish politician that ‘the great difference between England and Ireland is that in England you can say what you like so long as you do the right thing, in Ireland you can do what you like so long as you say the right thing,’ he capped it with ‘My father used to say that the great difference between England and Ireland is that every Englishman has rich relations and every Irishman poor ones.’

  His first enthusiasm after I got to know him was the establishment of an Academy of Letters, and he had a lovely time chasing about in taxis, giving lunch-parties, sending wires and pulling wires. He was an outrageous old flatterer. At that time I hadn’t even published a book and was being accepted into the Academy on trust, but when I asked whether Mr Somebody or Other was important enough to be a member Yeats replied: ‘Why worry about literary eminence? You and I will provide that.’

  Then he became a Fascist and started parading Dublin in a bright blue shirt. In his early revolutionary days he wanted the secret society he belonged to to steal the Coronation Stone from Westminster Abbey. In his Fascist phase he wanted the Blueshirts to rebuild Tara and transfer the capital there. He had neighbours who, he decided, were Blueshirts too, and these had a dog. Mrs Yeats, who was democratic in sympathies, kept hens, and the Blueshirt dog worried the democratic hens. Naturally, Yeats supported the dog. One day Mrs Yeats’ favourite hen disappeared, and she wrote to the neighbours to complain of the dog. By return the neighbours replied that the dog had been destroyed. Mrs Yeats, who was very fond of animals, was conscience-stricken, but Yeats was delighted at what he regarded as a true Blueshirt respect for law and order. One evening he called at my flat in a state of high glee. The democratic hen had returned safe and sound and Mrs Yeats was overwhelmed with remorse. Another victory over the democracies!

  Then I became a director of the Abbey Theatre, and our rows went on almost uninterruptedly until his death. He wanted Coriolanus produced in coloured shirts, in hopes of starting anti-Fascist riots as in Paris, but I dug in my heels about that. In time I almost became one of his enthusiasms myself, which was flattering but rather embarrassing, as he had fathered more bad art and literature than any great writer of his time. ‘Within five years,’ he told me once, ‘So-and-So will be a European figure.’ ‘Russell,’ he said to A.E., who was refusing to enthuse over another of his protégés, ‘I wish you and I had the same chance of immortality as that young man.’ But one liked the boyish eagerness which prompted it, the questioning way he read you some Godawful poem and tried to persuade you it was ‘profound,’ ‘Shakespearean,’ ‘the greatest thing produced in our time.’

  In his later years he got into a perfect fever over eugenics. It began by his asking me one night if I thought genius could be passed on from one generation to the next. I said I thought not; talent, perhaps, but not genius, and he got very cross, and only then did I realize that he was thinking of his son Michael. Then his face lit up, and he said: ‘I had an old aunt who used to say you could pass on anything you liked, provided you took care not to marry the girl next door.’

  After that the enthusiasm really got under way. Somebody or other, who was the greatest something or other of our time, had invented a method of testing intelligence that dispensed altogether with acquired knowledge and only tested natural aptitude. This had revealed the alarming fact that if you took children out of a slum and put them in decent surroundings their natural aptitude did not improve, so that the standard of human intelligence was steadily declining. One of the tests turned out to be a labyrinth problem, the second a picture of a heap of clothes on a strand, with a blank space in the middle of the clothes, which the unfortunate children were supposed to fill in with the name of the object that should have been represented. Being myself from a slum, I didn’t like to admit that I didn’t know from Adam what the appropriate object was, but curiosity compelled me to ask.

  ‘Oh,’ said Yeats, ‘a dog. To guard the clothes.’

  Intelligent or not, it struck me that the capacity of human beings for deluding themselves was practically infinite.

  ‘By the way,’ I asked, ‘do you think you’d ever have passed an intelligence test?’

  He thought about that for a while.

  ‘No,’ he admitted regretfully, ‘I suppose I wouldn’t.’

  In the last letter I received from him, written on his deathbed, he suggested that if I wanted his help I should wire and he would return and reorganize the entire Board of the theatre! I used to feel years younger after a visit to him. Disillusionment and cynicism simply dropped away from me when he was round.

  CENTENARY ADDRESS AT THE GRAVESIDE OF W. B. YEATS

  CEUD BLIAN o shoin do rugadh William Butler Yeats. ‘Ach da nesclaiti an doras anois,’ dubhairt Richard Best liom la amhain, ‘is da dtagadh Oscar Wilde no John Synge isteach, ta fhios agam nach naithneochfainn iad mar bheidis nios sine is nios laige na mar ataim-se fein anois. Ach ni mar sin a chim iad.’ Thuigeas cionnas mar a chonnaic se iad:

  I see them walking in an air of glory

  Whose light doth trample on my days …

  Is mar sin a chim Yeats. Is beodha anois e na le linn a bheatha fein, agus nil le deunamh agam ach an rud is doigh liom ba mhaith leis adearfainn do radh. Ba mhaith leis go labrochfainn an Ghaoluinn, mar biodh nach raibh aon teanga aige fein ach an Beurla (agus gur chuireas i niul do oiche amhain nach ro-mhaith a mheasas a bhi an Beurla fein aige) ba mhian leis nach bhfoghlui-meochfadh a mhac ach an Ghreigis agus an Ghaoluinn – niorbh fiu puinn leis an Laidin mar, dar leis, nar scriobhadh aon rud foghanta riamh innti – ach ba theanga na sibhialtachta an Chreigis, agus bhi gach aon rud eile le foghluim as an nGaoluinn. Nilim deimhnitheach go raibh iomlan an chirt aige.

  This is the hundredth birthday of William Butler Yeats. His personality and work have never seemed more alive than they do now, which makes this a day of rejoicing rather than of regret. My own task is an easy one because I have merely to say a few of the things I think he would have wished me to say. I know he would have wished me to speak Irish, because though he was no linguist he was fascinated by the Irish language and literature. One night he told me that all he wished his son to learn at school was Greek and Irish. Latin, according to him, had never produced a real writer, but Greek was the
language of civilization, and everything else a man needed to know could be learned from Irish.

  Another thing he would have wished me to do – and which I must do since none of the eminent people who have written of him in his centenary year has done so – is to say how much he owed to the young Englishwoman he married, and who made possible the enormous development of his genius from 1916 onward. This should be said by someone who was closer to them both than I was, but it was obvious even to a casual acquaintance. It is not too much to say that if Yeats had not married, or indeed, if he had married someone else, that the story of his later work would probably have been very different. In many ways he was a most fortunate man; fortunate in his parentage, because it is not every poet who has a genius for a father, and most fortunate in his marriage.

  He would have wished me too to commemorate along with him his great friends and collaborators, Lady Gregory and John Synge. He was a man with a genius for friendship; with a great memory for small kindnesses done him and a great generosity in forgetting injuries. No one without that sweetness of character could have detached Lady Gregory from her career as a London literary hostess and left her collecting folk stories in Gort, or John Synge from his Paris attic to live a lonely life on Aran. No one without it could have been so cruelly hurt at the bitterness shown to Synge in his last years. For a long time before Yeats’ marriage he withdrew gradually from Ireland and the Irish theatre to their great loss, but even that hurt he learned to ignore if not to forget. In this again, I think, we in Ireland may owe a debt to Mrs Yeats.

  I have introduced the issues of love and friendship deliberately because in the summing-up of any man’s achievement there are always two things to be taken into account – the man’s character and the character of the circumstances he had to deal with.

  The character of the circumstances is admirably expressed in his choice of a burial place, which my friends in Radio Eireann describe as ‘a quiet churchyard’. To the eye of the amateur historian like myself Drumcliffe is no Stoke Poges, but an important Columban monastery whose history reaches back to the sixth or seventh century. Indeed, Colam Cille may well have stood where we are standing now. If ever we in Ireland were to become conscious of our heritage, we should probably find at the other side of the road from the round tower the foundations of a beautiful twelfth-century church, and under the road itself, where trucks and cars pass by, we should find paved roadways, high crosses and numerous tombstones of abbots and kings. Yeats was not the first great man to be buried here; but this is the sort of Ireland he inherited, and that we still inherit – a ruined, fragmented country, divorced from its past. His father before him had inherited it, and on it he blamed what he thought were our faults as a people. ‘The faults of the Irishman,’ he wrote, ‘his foolish swagger and wild exaggeration of himself and everything, is because, notwithstanding his love for his native land, he is not allowed to have pride in it. The individual personality is enormously strengthened by the national personality – the Frenchman is more himself because of Paris.’

  In Yeats’ youth he had been divorced from the religion of his ancestors by his father’s good-natured atheism, qualified by palmistry; and from the time he was a boy he set out to fashion a religion for himself from fragments of Greek and Indian mythology and the poetry of Shelley and Blake. In the same way by a system of education that is still with us he had been divorced from his country’s past, though its monuments were all about him, on Knocknarea, in Carrowmore, in Sligo and Dromahair; and in the same patient, stubborn way he set himself to re-create an Early Ireland of his own from a handful of translations of old sagas and poems. Even when he was an old man, you could still make him happy with some fragment of Irish literature he did not know, and this was not easy because he knew almost everything that had been written by an Irishman.

  This is where the character of the man and the character of the circumstances met, for a fragmented country offers little to a young writer with a vigorous mind. If Paris strengthens the Frenchman’s character, Dublin enfeebles the Irishman’s. We must, I think, be the only civilized country whose universities have no chair of the national literature. Ireland would have killed Joyce if he had not left it; he felt sure it had killed Yeats, and told him so, a little too soon perhaps.

  But in fact the same background that would have killed Joyce gave Yeats his opportunity. He had the sort of eclectic, synthetic mind that can always discover ‘the right twigs for an eagle’s nest’; the sort of mind that can build happily among ruins. He compared himself with the bee – ‘O honey bees, come build in the empty house of the stare.’ It needed a mind like his, strong, but full of sweetness to build in this empty house of ours, and to see beyond the quarrelling sects and factions an older Ireland where men could still afford to be brave and generous and gay.

  And I choose the laughing lip

  That shall not turn from laughing, whatever rise or fall;

  The heart that grows no bitterer, although betrayed by all;

  The hand that loves to scatter; the life like a gambler’s throw.

  That is the real voice of Yeats; faithful to his own party, but never embittered, never unjust. Once, during his supposed Fascist period a certain famous Englishman approached him at a party in London and said, ‘Of course, you support Mr Cosgrave’s party, Yeats,’ and Yeats replied, ‘Oh, I support the gunmen – on both sides!’ (‘And the damn fool turned his back on me,’ he added when he told me the story.) Even his worst enemy he would remember for some kind or chivalrous gesture. Once when a journalist who had attacked himself and Maud Gonne died he said to me, ‘And yet all the time, that man knew one secret about Maud Gonne that could have destroyed her influence forever. I went to see him in his office and said, “You must never say that!” and he went on attacking us as bitterly as ever, but he never said it.’

  He dreamed of an Ireland where people would disagree without recrimination and excommunication. When he opposed the Divorce Bill in the Senate it was because it made a further cleavage between Catholic and Protestant, and his speech begins in a characteristic way, ‘It is perhaps the deepest political passion with this nation that North and South should be united.’ One night he said to me, ‘You may live to see what I shall never see – the day when Irishmen can disagree without each demanding that the other shall worship at his own narrow conventicle.’ He was criticizing the greatest single weakness in our people, our tendency to turn everything we love from our language to our religion into a test of orthodoxy.

  It is part of the fragmentation of our national life, and the part that is most injurious to our culture, for culture is an interpenetration and mingling of all the creative forces within a country. Because we leave our literary history to be written by Americans and Englishmen, we fail to see how in Yeats’ prime the language movement and the literary movement fed one another, and were themselves fed by other creative activities like co-operative creameries and the beautiful stained glass of Loughrea Cathedral and Cong parish church.

  A poet’s work endures, but if it has been fruitful, it changes its meaning from generation to generation. This is Yeats’ hundredth birthday, and his first birthday into immortality. Today we establish a tradition, and I can only hope it will be a worthy one. I should like to think that as a hundredth birthday present we might do something that would ensure that no young Irishman would ever again grow up so ignorant of his own past; that we might establish a chair of Irish literature in one of our universities, or restore Sligo Abbey, which is as beautiful as any Oxford college, as a repository of the great collection of Yeats relics that Miss Niland has already acquired.

  Through centuries after this, if our civilization lasts, others will speak where I am speaking now and other audiences will listen. I hope that what they will praise in Yeats will not be the things that we praise, for that would merely mean that we had left our work undone, and that the tradition we establish today may be the basis of another different Ireland:

  That we in com
ing days may be

  Still the indomitable Irishry.

  Drumcliffe, June 13th, 1965.

  From LEINSTER, MUNSTER AND CONNAUGHT – THE TAILOR AND ANSTEY

  THE TAILOR, when I knew him first, was over eighty, a crippled little Kerryman with soft, round, rosy cheeks exactly like a baby’s and two brilliant, mischievous baby eyes. His eyes were the first thing that attracted you. He had no teeth, and he spoke very fast from far back in his throat, and talk and laughter mixed and bubbled like water and wind in a pipe. Most fine days he sat on the road outside his house, maybe minding the cow, but never doing anything much else in the nature of work; the most approachable man in the world, for he had no slyness and distrusted no human being, wherever he might come from. If a Chinese had happened to pass the way, the Tailor would have saluted him politely and asked him how the divil things were by them in China, and, if the man was an intelligent, conversible sort of man who could pass a shrewd comment or crack a joke, the Tailor would have brought him home to Anstey, his wife, and accepted him as a friend along with Kirsten, the Danish girl, Ripley, the American, Seumas, the sculptor, and the English colonel – his ‘scholars’, as he called them.

  Not only did he not distrust people, but, what is much rarer in Ireland, country or town, he did not distrust ideas or conventions. I could not say if this was charity, natural good breeding or simple intellectual independence, but, if someone had dropped in an auto-giro and offered the Tailor a lift, the old man would have gone without giving it a thought, in spite of the shrieks and curses of Anstey. ‘Take the world easy and the world will take you easy,’ the Tailor told her, but he never managed to get her to appreciate it, because she was a woman of the ancient world, and love and hatred stuck like hooks in her heart.