The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘I bought them last time I was in Paris,’ he said, standing beside me and looking at the books as though he were seeing them for the first time.

  ‘A deathbed repentance?’ I asked lightly, but he ignored me.

  ‘I met another great admirer of his there,’ he said sourly. ‘A lady you should meet some time.’

  ‘I’d love to if I ever get there,’ I said.

  ‘Her address is the Rue de Grenelle,’ he said, and then with a wild burst of mockery, ‘the left-hand pavement.’

  At last his guard was down, and it was Maupassant’s name that had done it. And still I couldn’t say anything. An angry flush mounted his pale dark face and made it sinister in its violence.

  ‘I suppose you didn’t know I indulged in that hideous vice?’ he snarled.

  ‘I heard something,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Terry.’

  The angry flush died out of his face and the old brooding look came back.

  ‘A funny thing about those books,’ he said. ‘This woman I was speaking about, I thought she was bringing me to a hotel. I suppose I was a bit muddled with drink, but after dark, one of these places is much like another. “This isn’t a hotel,” I said when we got upstairs. “No,” she said, “it’s my room.” ’

  As he told it, I could see that he was living it all over again, something he could tell nobody but myself.

  ‘There was a screen in the corner. I suppose it’s the result of reading too much romantic fiction, but I thought there might be somebody hidden behind it. There was. You’d never guess what?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A baby,’ he said, his eyes boring through me. ‘A child of maybe eighteen months. I wouldn’t know. While I was looking, she changed him. He didn’t wake.’

  ‘What was it?’ I asked, searching for the message that he obviously thought the incident contained. ‘A dodge?’

  ‘No,’ he said almost grudgingly. ‘A country girl in trouble, trying to support her child, that’s all. We went to bed and she fell asleep. I couldn’t. It’s many years now since I’ve been able to sleep like that. So I put on the light and began to read one of these books that I carried round in my pocket. The light woke her and she wanted to see what I had. “Oh, Maupassant,” she said. “He’s a great writer.” “Is he?” I said. I thought she might be repeating something she’d picked up from one of her customers. She wasn’t. She began to talk about Boule de Suif. It reminded me of the arguments we used to have in our young days.’ Suddenly he gave me a curious boyish smile. ‘You remember, when we used to walk up the river together.’

  ‘Oh, I remember,’ I said with a sigh.

  ‘We were terrible young idiots, the pair of us,’ he said sadly. ‘Then she began to talk about The Tellier Household. I said it had poetry. “Oh, if it’s poetry you want, you don’t go to Maupassant. You go to Vigny, you go to Musset, and Maupassant is life, and life isn’t poetry. It’s only when you see what life can do to you that you realize what a great writer Maupassant is.”… Wasn’t that an extraordinary thing to happen?’ he asked fiercely, and again the angry colour mounted his cheeks.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ I said, wondering if Terry himself knew how extraordinary it was. But it was exactly as if he were reading the thoughts as they crossed my mind.

  ‘A prostitute from some French village; a drunken old waster from an Irish provincial town, lying awake in the dawn in Paris, discussing Maupassant. And the baby, of course. Maupassant would have made a lot of the baby.’

  ‘I declare to God, I think if I’d been in your shoes, I’d have brought them back with me,’ I said. I knew when I said it that I was talking nonsense, but it was a sort of release for all the bitterness inside me.

  ‘What?’ he asked, mocking me. ‘A prostitute and her baby? My dear Mr Magner, you’re becoming positively romantic in your old age.’

  ‘A man like you should have a wife and children,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, but that’s a different story,’ he said malevolently. ‘Maupassant would never have ended a story like that.’

  And he looked at me almost triumphantly with those mad, dark eyes. I knew how Maupassant would have ended that story all right. Maupassant, as the girl said, was life, and life was pretty nearly through with Terry Coughlan.

  THE CONVERSION

  ‘The Conversion’ draws on a 1950 cycling trip through France with O’Connor’s friend Stan Stewart.

  GÉRONTE AND I landed in Dieppe on the afternoon of Holy Thursday. Géronte is the companion of all my cycling trips; we have covered together most of Ireland and a lot of England, but this was our first trip to France, and we were rather scared.

  On the whole, we make a good mixture; I, in my late forties, tall, gaunt and seedy; Géronte, in the neighbourhood of sixty, a pipe smoker, small and stout, and with the digestion and temper necessary to handle a chronic dyspeptic. He was brought up in an Irish Protestant house where it was a sin to play on Sunday, I, in an Irish Catholic one where I was encouraged to give the Infant Jesus in the Christmas crib a clockwork engine as a present. In our cynical middle age, the difference of upbringing still comes out. I, restive and fiery, can be led a great part of the way by anyone who will talk soothingly to me and pat me on the nose; Géronte, the most good-natured of men, remains the complete individualist, and will submit to dictation from nobody.

  There was, for instance, the awful half-hour in Warwick Castle. While the guard showed us the armour, Géronte discovered what he took to be a Breughel; when the guide reached the Breughel, I found Géronte in the castle chapel looking at the ceiling and muttering ‘Contra-Buhl’ between his teeth. In the great hall, when the guide showed the furniture, Géronte affected interest in a gittern presented by Queen Elizabeth to Leicester, and when the guide, noticing his apparent interest, began to tell us about it, Géronte grabbed me by the arm and hissed, ‘Tell the damn fellow we’re not going to look at any more of his damn rubbish!’ Eventually I had to tell the guide that my friend was ill.

  Travelling with a man like Géronte has its advantages as well as its embarrassments, for of all men he is the most completely unaffected by propaganda. He can look at the most famous work of art in the world, first through his spectacles and then over them, and finally sum it up without self-consciousness, as though nobody in the world had ever seen it before. It is the story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ eternally renewed.

  Only two others on the ship had bicycles; we parted from them with regret on the quay, and, full of suspicions of French traffic, pushed our bicycles up the main street. We were so scared we even left the parish church on our left unvisited. Géronte did buy himself a pair of insoles for his shoes, and that struck me as great boldness, for even in England I had found it hard to make myself understood when I wanted insoles, and it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized the natives call them ‘socks’. Instead, I bought a kilo of apples under the mistaken impression that a kilo was a pound, and then wondered what I was to do with them.

  Even after we had walked into the open country, Géronte insisted on cycling in single file, a most unsociable practice, and he didn’t really relax till after our first meal in a wayside pub, when he, with a French shakier even than mine, had boldly gone out and bought what he called ‘a yard of bread’. That gave him confidence. In the evening light the downland country we cycled through became magical, Sussex with a slight accent. In the village churches there was a mass of baroque and rococo statuary, second-rate work, but wonderful after the bareness of Irish and English parish churches where Géronte’s ancestors had smashed everything with a face. But none of the statues were draped in purple. It was Holy Thursday, and I thought it strange to find the statues undraped and the churches empty. It gave me the feeling that something was wrong.

  Next day, no longer feeling like foreigners, we cycled on in the direction of Beauvais. It was Good Friday, but the story was the same. We came to a beautiful church and found it locked. Through the plain glass windows we saw that the woodwork and stat
ues inside were excellent. By this time I was becoming really inquisitive, and while Géronte went off with two children from a near-by cottage to locate the key of the church, I remained behind and questioned the children’s mother.

  ‘Tell me,’ I asked, ‘is there no service here today?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘But surely you have Mass here?’

  ‘No. We only hear Mass occasionally. Once in six months, perhaps.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘We have no priest.’

  So that was it! That was why the statues remained undraped. Here the enemy of the churches was not puritanism, but something more deadly because more logical, something which left them their beauty but removed their significance.

  At the next village we found the parish church open because the organist was practising. He was a young man, good-looking, with a slight moustache, and after a few minutes he got up and joined us. He might have been the expression in the flesh of the logic we had seen at work on the other churches. He proceeded politely to tell us the life stories of the more unfamiliar saints, and by the time he was finished there was little left of the saints. Yet we liked him, as we shouldn’t have liked a puritan.

  ‘You’re English, I suppose?’ he asked as we were leaving.

  ‘No, Irish.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said with a shrug, ‘of Ireland I know nothing but James Joyce.’

  ‘You know quite a lot if you know that,’ I replied, and again we fell into talk, and he told us how he had read Ulysses in the Ste Geneviève Library in the evenings and given up Finnegans Wake as a bad job. He was the sort of young man who makes France worth while, the sort who takes naturally to culture and not because he doesn’t feel himself capable of business or games. We parted from him with real regret.

  But the parting was not complete. We had cycled some miles farther and found yet another locked church, when he caught up on us. He, too, was riding a bicycle, and he excused himself in terms that were familiar enough to me from having heard them so often in rural Ireland from young country priests and teachers. The poor devil was dying of loneliness; there wasn’t a soul in the village he could talk to about books or music except his uncle, the parish priest, a severe, old-fashioned man who still looked on Flaubert and De Maupassant as ‘immoral writers’ and kept their books locked up. How well I knew that old uncle! How often I had argued with him in the days when I was a librarian, trying to get the hospitable, saintly, pig-headed old devil to let me start a library in his godforsaken parish where the unfortunate people were drinking themselves to death for want of something to do! And failed! It isn’t the bad priests who break your heart, but the good ones.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the organist, ‘as if he couldn’t find all the vices of Flaubert and De Maupassant among his own parishioners!’

  ‘Do you think so?’ I asked. ‘I’ve always wondered if there really were people like De Maupassant’s Normans.’

  ‘You needn’t,’ said the organist. ‘Look at me!’

  I asked him about the locked churches and our chances of hearing Tenebrae anywhere along the road.

  ‘You won’t hear Tenebrae anywhere outside Beauvais,’ he replied. ‘You couldn’t get a choir together in this whole country. My uncle is having the Stations of the Cross tonight. That was why I was practising. I’m the one who has to carry the cross.’

  He tried out his irreverent jokes on us just to see how we responded. He was full of curiosity about us cycling round, looking at statues, wanting to hear Tenebrae – obviously a pious pair and yet laughing at his jokes about religion. It wasn’t right.

  ‘You Irish are all Catholics, aren’t you?’ he asked with mock innocence.

  ‘Not all,’ I replied. ‘My friend is a Protestant.’

  ‘He has all my sympathy,’ the organist replied gravely. ‘That, I suppose, explains his interest in statues?’

  ‘Except modern ones,’ said Géronte.

  ‘Bah!’ said the organist. ‘Iconoclast!’

  Whatever else he may not have shared with De Maupassant’s Normans, he certainly had all their inquisitiveness. He wasn’t satisfied with my attempts at an explanation. He went on with his probing. As for him, he was an atheist – with an uncle a parish priest, what else could he be? He was a delightful young fellow and excellent company in a strange country.

  We cycled on for some miles till we came to a really attractive village green where we halted for tea. It had a wall of trees round it, and behind a hedge at the back rose a great parish church. This was really only the choir of a large church begun by the English during their occupation of Normandy and never completed. There were a few labourers at work on the road. We rested our bicycles against the hedge before the church and got out the coffee and rolls and Irish whiskey. Géronte explained to the organist how he must drink the whiskey to get the full effect of it, ‘without hitting his tonsils’, and the organist compared it (I thought, without much conviction) to fine. We sat on the grass enjoying the meal and the evening sunlight, when suddenly the organist, who seemed to have been following up his own train of thought all the time, began to chuckle.

  ‘I understand it all now,’ he explained. ‘You are a very bad Catholic; he is a very bad Protestant, and so, you can be very good friends.’

  At last the French intellect had found its formula, and there was sufficient truth in it to make Géronte and myself laugh, too. We were still laughing when one of the labourers hailed us.

  ‘Aren’t you fellows going to the flicks?’ he shouted.

  ‘Flicks?’ the organist shouted back, looking puzzled. ‘What flicks?’

  ‘In there,’ said the labourer, jerking his thumb in the direction of the church.

  ‘Flicks,’ the organist repeated to us.

  ‘The Stations of the Cross,’ shouted the labourer.

  ‘Ah,’ said the organist, beginning to laugh apologetically, ‘the Stations of the Cross.’

  We listened, but we could hear no organ or anything else from the church.

  ‘Why don’t we go in?’ I asked, and we packed up our food and went into the church.

  It was a huge church, bigger even than it had appeared from outside, and only a bay or two of the nave had been completed before the west wall had been roughly put in to finish it off. It was as bare as it was high, with no ornament but one excellent modern statue of the Blessed Virgin on a crossing pier at the south side of the choir.

  I went into the pew farthest from the altar and was followed by Géronte and the organist. It was only then I realized why we had heard no sound from outside. There was no organ. A young priest was celebrating the Stations of the Cross accompanied by two acolytes, and the whole congregation in that great church consisted of three women and two little girls – mothers, aunts and sisters of the acolytes – who had obviously come not to join in the service but to see Jean and Louis perform. I hope they enjoyed them more than I did. There is a frustrated acolyte somewhere in me, and it rose within me like a wave of fury at the incompetence and silliness of those two horrible children. The young priest had to steer them. They didn’t know where to go, didn’t know what to do, didn’t know when to genuflect and when not. Louis was just a plain born idiot; Jean was a show box who knew the music of two whole bars of the canticles, and whenever they turned up joined in in a lusty ‘la-la-la’ and then looked round to his family for approval.

  What made the flightiness of the acolytes more striking was the recollection of the young priest. I watched him and found myself falling under a spell. He looked small and lost in that great bare barrack of a church. His voice was weak and toneless. His face wasn’t the face of a priest, and it took me some minutes to remember where and when I had seen faces like his before. Then I remembered. It was among young airmen during the war.

  But the really extraordinary thing was that he was creating a congregation for himself out of his head. He was not celebrating a service for three reluctant women and two small girls who had merely been dragged in
to see members of their family perform in a countryside where God was dead. He was celebrating it in a crowded church in some cathedral town of the Middle Ages. The hypnotic influence he exerted came from the fact that he had hypnotized himself. You saw it in his extraordinary recollection, in the way he managed to push those acolytes about without once letting go the spell. I wondered if I wasn’t imagining it all. I looked at Géronte to see how he was taking it. He, whose usual response to a church service is like his response to a conducted tour, was half-kneeling, his eyes fixed on the priest as though he were some work of art which had to be sized up.

  ‘This is one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen,’ he whispered without looking round.

  The organist heard the whisper without understanding it. He was sitting back gloomily, his hand over his face. He bent across Géronte’s arched back to whisper to me.

  ‘I must apologize.’

  ‘Apologize for what?’ I asked.

  ‘This,’ he said with a wave of the hand. ‘I’m ashamed. Really, I’m ashamed.’

  ‘But of what?’ I asked. ‘The Church of the Catacombs?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The Church of the Catacombs.’

  He said nothing to that, and the service went on, disorderly, disconnected, ridiculous, but for the young priest who held it all together by some sort of inner power. What I felt then I have felt on other occasions, but it is hard to describe. I have felt it about a picture of a nun which has been standing before me for some days. I felt it about another picture, which I took in a Fever Hospital when a family whose child had died asked me to photograph the little body for them one summer morning in the mortuary chapel. The photographs I took were beautiful, but I could not live with them. In a peculiar way the positions had been reversed; the object had become the subject; the dead child had photographed the camera. It is the sudden reversal of situation which is familiar in dreams and which sooner or later happens to all of us and to the civilizations to which we belong. Bethlehem itself was merely an interesting object which the Roman Empire had studied with amusement, till suddenly it opened its eyes and the Roman Empire was no more.