by Brian Moore
In the bedroom the naked girl screamed, cowering under Mangan. He looked at this brute, who looked back at him with his own face. “And you,” he said. “What happened to you?”
“I got as far as the crossroads between Drishane and Bantry, squeezing what was left there, holding it tight, the blood dripping between my legs. It worked like a tourniquet, the doctors told me later. Anyway, it half stopped the bleeding, and the next thing I saw up on the road ahead was one of those big international trucks. I held up my hand and he stopped. I told him I’d been kicked by a horse and asked to be taken to Bantry if that was on his road. So he took me and let me off at the hospital there. When they rushed me into the emergency room I was half fainting and not thinking, so I made the mistake of giving my own name and address. And told the doctor who examined me that my prick was an occasion of sin to me and that I’d cut it off. I was hoping to make him believe that I was some sort of religious maniac. That was my second mistake, for by saying that, I made them treat me like a lunatic and so the hospital phoned the police and reported what I’d said. And the next thing, the Guards were over to Duntally, asking what had happened. And in the meantime there was holy murder on the home front. Kathleen’s screaming had wakened Con and he brought both of the girls back down to Duntally and then the whole story came out. And all of them, including Eileen, went out to look for me, thinking I’d be bleeding to death in a ditch someplace. And by morning, when they hadn’t found me, they were all sitting around in Duntally wondering what to do next, when in walked the police. And young Kathleen was still hysterical, and right off she let the cat out of the bag. That put the police in an awkward position, do you see. By rights they should be charging Maeve with assault with a weapon. Dinny, of course, was anxious to keep it hushed up and not interfere with his job at the bank, so he got on his motorbike and off to Bantry to see me. That was quite a meeting between father and son, I can tell you. Of course, I’d known all along that I could get seven years for having intercourse with a girl under thirteen. It wasn’t only Kathleen I was afraid would testify against me, but Maeve as well. Dinny got me to discharge myself from the hospital and packed me off on a train to Dublin. He and I made a deal. He promised to support me for as long as I’d stay in Dublin and lie low.
“So I went there and got treatment in Jervis Street Hospital as an outpatient and lived in a roominghouse down behind the quays. It was my first time in Dublin since I was a boy, and I went to see Mangan’s statue and all the rest of it. The thing was, as long as I couldn’t be found, the police couldn’t bring charges. Back home, of course, the story had got out. That drunken scut Con never could keep his mouth shut about anything. He even told some newspaper fellow, and the next thing, it was in those English dirty newspapers. Maeve had gone off to England and the newspaper tracked her down to a convent in Manchester where she was living and working as a lay sister. It was an enclosed order of nuns and so the paper had a whole yarn about vows of eternal silence and so forth. Of course, it was poor Eileen and Dinny who were the main victims. The scandal did him no good at the bank and he was miserable, thinking everyone was whispering behind his back. So he quit the bank. He tried to farm Duntally and failed, and now the land is rented and he works for the County Council on the roads as a laborer. Anyway, to get back to me, I got sick of living in a roominghouse in Dublin. I wanted to come home to the west of Ireland. So Dinny came up to see me and we worked out a scheme. He told the rest of the family that I’d passed away of a heart attack the same as my brother Fergus had. He even got a priest to write a letter to Eileen about it. She’d been off for a spell in Our Lady’s after the incident, did I tell you that? Anyway, I don’t know how he managed the letter from the priest expressing condolences and so on, but he did. He was always very thick with the priests, Dinny. And that’s it. My confession. I live out here alone on these headlands and I look after the German’s sheep and I go down to the German’s place once a week for a bath and to see if there’s any post for me. And once a week I walk all the way to the town of Butler, where I down a few pints and buy the papers and talk to people. In Butler, they think I’m a spoiled priest, an educated man like me herding sheep, what else would they think? As for women, I am no use to them any more.” He smiled ruefully. “That is my penance. She robbed me of my abilities but not my desires. Well, I’ll tell you the truth. I have written love poetry but I have never really loved a woman. Poetry is all I care about. I’m still writing under my own name. I send things out now and then, but I’ve been getting the usual runaround. In Ireland it’s not what you do, it’s who you know. If there was any poetic justice, which there’s not, I’d be as well known as James Clarence himself. But I suppose you could look at it another way—and I do. Genius—the real thing, not the imitation—is hardly ever recognized in its own time. Take Schopenhauer. Take Stendhal. And yet the mark of true genius is that it can’t be discouraged. Its time will come. You know, when I read Dinny’s letter and saw you here today, the first thought that came into my mind was that here, at last, is my link with the past and with the future, a man with my own face, a poet, a younger me. I keep thinking that perhaps, although you don’t know it, you are my moment and you have come. Do you understand me?”
The face was now trying to win him over. He looked at that face, saw it set in his own winning smile; an older me, a vision of myself in hell. He did not speak.
“No, how could you?” the face said. “Well, let me explain it to you. You could be the means of getting me out of here. You could be the way I’d see my fame in my own lifetime.”
“Get out of here?” Mangan asked. “But there are no charges against you, are there? All of this happened years ago. Your daughter is living in Manchester. And Kathleen isn’t going to make trouble for you, if she finds out you’re still alive.”
“You’re right. But who is to say the police will not file charges against me if I go home tomorrow? And I can’t go home, don’t you see that. Why should I go back to a place where all they can see in me is a shame and a disgrace, where men and boys would be sniggering at me in pubs and asking to have a look at what I don’t have any more. Why would I go back to a wife who never was a wife to me, a madwoman who’s in and out of the asylum? I’m far better off here. I live in a Norman tower, like Yeats himself, thirteenth century this one is, and with a grander view than ever Yeats looked out at from his at Thoor Ballylee. No, you misunderstood me. I don’t want to leave here. Someday this place will be like Thoor Ballylee, there’ll be tourists tramping over the heads to look at it and a plaque up on the wall saying it was where I lived and died. No, when I said I want to get out of here, I was speaking of my work. I want to get my work out, don’t you see? There’s always the chance that my work will be passed by in the future as it is being passed by today. I said to you that all the biographies show that men of genius can’t be discouraged. But what of all the geniuses who were never discovered, the ones whose biographies will never be written? Maybe they weren’t discouraged, either. Maybe they persevered against all odds all their lives, and for what? To die unknown. No, what I’m telling you is, suppose my poems could be published now in America. I’d only leave here once in a while to give a reading in London or in New York or somewhere. I’d not give up this place. That’s what I mean by getting out. To get out just long enough to be properly discovered. Now, you’re a poet yourself, you know the ropes over there. Listen, what I’m asking you plain and simple is: Will you help me get my poems published in America?”
“I find it hard enough to get my own poems published there.”
“But mine will be a different story,” his double said. “You’ll see what I mean when I show you a few. But let’s have a drink first. We’ve had confession. Now let’s have a little benediction.” He held out his hand for the bottle, and when Mangan took it out from between his legs and handed it over, his double rose, poured gin in both tin cups, served Mangan, then, addressing him, held his own cup aloft, smiling. “A toast to you!
“My sovereign power, my nobleness,
My health, my strength to curse and bless,
My royal privilege of protection,
I leave to the son of my best affection,
Ross Faly, Ross of the Rings,
Worthy descendant of Ireland’s Kings!”
He drank and said, “That’s from James Clarence. It’s one of the poems he Englished from an old Irish one. ‘My royal privilege of protection, I leave to the son of my best affection.’ That could be yourself, for don’t you look as though you are my son? Those photographs today, the one you brought and the one I have? Don’t they make it a red-letter day in both our lives? For they’re proof positive that you and I and Uncle Dan all descend from the man himself. Proof positive! The same man with the same face, the same gift of poetry passed on, and the pain that has been passed on as well. Lives filled with troubles and injustice and neglect. And yet aren’t we proud of that heritage, both of us? I drink to you now, son of my best affection. Ah, it’s a great day in my existence to see you come before me now, like a vision. And you will help with my poems, I know you will.”
He smiled as he spoke, smiled with a strange mixture of arrogance and entreaty, and Mangan, looking at him, was filled with a premonition that he was looking at what he himself might one day become. It was as though in the recital of this sordid, horrible tale his double, like some scabrous sufferer from a dread disease, signaled that his listener was also infected. Mangan felt his skin prickle as the other crossed the room, seating himself at the rough table, self-importantly sorting the school exercise books. He watched him open and peruse one book, and then, wanting to look away from that sight, he glanced down at the photographs strewn on the hearth before him.
Daniel James Mangan, the author of Tales from the West, looked up at him. Himself at twenty, a newly won diploma in his hand. And himself, older, wearing a strange long cape, a spectral figure in the Fagel Library in 1846. And his familiar, the companion of his journey, eyes glittering greenishly in the shimmering light from its delicate copper surface. As always, it was this first and last image which brought that giddy feeling, that self, the sight of which had brought him to this island on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, to an eighteen-year-old girl cowering naked in the corner of a bedroom, to this ruined tower and the last, most disquieting double of all, this foul, fawning child molester. His hand shook as he reached out and picked up the daguerreotype, the object which had inspired this unlucky search, seized irrationally by the idea that if he got rid of it now it would be a first step toward his escape from this net of unnaturally close resemblances, sordid family history, and unnerving hints of prophecy. “By the way,” he said to his double, who was still rummaging through his exercise books, “I was thinking that I’d like to leave you this daguerreotype as a gift. You said, didn’t you, that you think of it as the transatlantic evidence that you’re really related to Mangan the poet.”
“Yes, it’s the corroboration of what I’ve always sensed to be the truth. I’ll tell you what. You leave it with me and I’ll send it back to you later on. I’d like to look at it again.”
“But I don’t want it back,” Mangan said. “I’m glad to let you have it.”
“Well, thank you, then. There’s a poem here I’m looking for, a short poem I think is the best thing I’ve done so far. You could say it’s my masterpiece. It’s here someplace. I want you to read it.”
Above, rain began to beat again on the tarpaulin roof. Mangan remembered the long journey back to his car as a prisoner recalls the route home from his jail. To run now from these hated self-images strewn about him, and above all, from this mutilated passport of future decay. But surely I have never been this person, this foul old swill. And at that moment, as he looked again at his double, there entered into him a rage more powerful than any he had ever felt against another human being. If, at that moment, someone were to hand him a knife, he felt certain he would plunge it in that back bent over the rough table. Hatred clouded his vision. He felt dizzy, as though the blood had drained from his head.
“Here we are,” the hated voice said. “This is the one. This is the one I want you to look at.”
A ruled exercise book was opened and thrust at him. Obedient, he stared at the handwritten page, but his hand shook in an angry tremor and the words danced like imps before his eyes, gibberish in his furious brain. And in that moment, like a knife handed to him, he saw his escape and his revenge. He stared at the words, then put down the book.
“Well?” asked the eager, anxious, boastful voice.
“It’s not good.”
“What did you say?”
“I said it’s no good. Show me something else.”
The other looked at him with a sudden surprising stare, then, without comment, turned and went back to the table, picking up exercise books and single sheets, rejecting them, going on with his search, until at last as in inspiration he turned to his bookshelves and took down a small, yellowing magazine printed on cheap paper: Dublin Poetry Journal. He opened this and handed it to Mangan.
FOR MAEVE
Michael James Mangan
Four stanzas, the poet as father writing wishes for his child’s protection. Maeve. Now the words no longer danced in gibberish. Mangan read the verses slowly, stiff with contempt, remembering Yeats’s prayer for his daughter, placing these thin lines alongside a great poet’s work. He put the poem down. “Yeats said it much better.”
“Maybe. But has it merit? It is work from my younger days.”
“I don’t think so. I can’t see any merit.”
In silence the other picked up the poem from where Mangan had laid it, put it back on the shelf, and went again to rummage at his worktable. A poem for Maeve, the daughter he “protected” by incest, whose anger had mutilated him for life. How can he have the nerve to show me that! But now the other came back with a long sheet of foolscap in his hand. “All right, then,” the hated voice said. “I want you to read this. I just don’t want you saying that it’s no good or something like that. I want to know why it’s no good. Or if it’s good, tell me why. This is new work. It was written last winter, here in this tower.”
There was no title. The poem was still in working manuscript form, with deletions and small changes in the lines. The foolscap was thumbed, dirty, and creased, as though it had been carried about in a pocket. Mangan began to read, but as he did, a sudden guilty doubt filled him. How could he, in his hatred of the man, fairly judge his work? Wasn’t he filled with loathing and fear when he looked at this, his foul older self? Didn’t he want above all to wound this specter of his future degradation, this sad, disgusting climax to his search for his forebears?
He read on, and as he did, became peripherally aware of the other’s awful nervousness. From the edge of his eye he saw the Wellington boots shuffle on the stone floor and heard the man’s harsh, anxious breathing. The poem was a meditation on death and at once he thought of the Symbolists, remembering the books he had seen earlier on these shelves: translations from Mallarmé and Rimbaud, the verses of Wilde. He read it, then read it again, and this time better understood what the poem was trying to say. The stanzas were filled with muffled hints about the sexual “follies” of the poet’s life, and the poem ended with a denial that they weighed in the balance when set against the poems, his life’s work. It was a testament, and as he read it again, his anger was so great that he no longer was capable of seeing it as a poem. He read the last lines:
Alexander, Nero, Christ,
Are words on paper, at the world’s end.
And handed back the foolscap in silence.
“I asked for your opinion.”
“I don’t think I can give it to you.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t judge it. I’m completely hostile to its content.”
“Why would you dislike what it says?” His double held up the foolscap, his hand shaking. “Isn’t it true what it says? Isn’t that what all history comes dow
n to in the end? Words on paper, words in books, a handful of books, isn’t that it? The thing that matters about my life is there on the page. If it’s no good, then I don’t matter. And if it is good, it’s that that is my life, not the troubles I’ve had or the good or bad I did to those around me. You’re one of us, you’re a poet, you said. You should know better than anyone what I’m talking about. What is this like as a poem? That’s what I’m asking you. It’s the only question I have for you.”
And again, confronted by that staring face, Mangan felt that he looked upon himself, a self he wanted to destroy. “It’s a poem,” he shouted suddenly. “Do you hear me? It’s only a poem. Besides, you’ve been reading the Symbolists and it shows.”
“How does it show?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, what does it matter! It’s only a poem and it’s an indifferent poem. But even if it were a good poem, that doesn’t get you off the hook. You’re talking about two different things. All right, in the end, history comes down to words. But, before that, it happened. And words that try to change what happened are lying words. You bastard. You and your poem for Maeve! What you did to Maeve can’t be wiped out by a few lines you scribbled before you screwed her life up. And what you did to Kathleen won’t earn absolution because you sit here writing verse, imitating Yeats in his tower.”
“Ah, so that’s it!” the other said, his face lit in a smile of blazing anger. “So it’s a little moral man we have here, a little priesteen giving out with his sermons and his penances. Infernal bloody cheek, you pretending to be a fit judge of poetry when you care as much about poetry as my dogs do. Well, it’s good news, in a way. Yes, good news! To think that for a minute there, because you have my face and you call yourself a poet, I was trembling before the judgment seat and cast down by your arsehole pronouncements about my work. Indifferent poem, is it? Symbolist imitation, is it? It will be read aloud, year in and year out, when the dust has scattered you and every bloody thing you ever wrote.”
