Algren at Sea (7 page)

The Irish stewardess did give me one bad moment, however, when, leaning over to fasten me more securely into my seat belt, she threw me a glance of ill-concealed lust. The woman was on the verge of losing her self-control, I perceived.

When she bade me goodbye on the ramp I merely tossed my head and never saw the bold creature again.

I had come to Dublin to have a fast glance at that Irish Republican felon who would rather detonate Lord Nelson than ride free on a passenger train, a house-painting jackeen who used no ladder, and that very same party who, put before American television, had once blown a bit of well-dressed dust called John Mason Nothing off the screen.

The name was Brendan Behan, a terrible fellow in height six-foot-twelve, to be seen only maddened by drink, prone in the street or battling gendarmes on the
Rue des Martyrs.

The panel on which this dangerous stud had disposed of the highly expendable Mr. Nothing had been billed as “The Art of Conversation,” and the essence of Mr. Behan's opening thought was: “The art of conversation is dead and you Americans have murdered it as you are murdering everything else worthwhile in the world, so I'll now sing you
Kevin Barry—

“The art of conversation isn't the only thing dying around here,” the swift Mr. Nothing (who is nothing if not swift) nipped in but didn't quite get out.

“You have your people and I have mine,” the slower man replied cheerfully, “so I'll now sing you a bit of
The Dublin Brigade
—

—or words to that effect. Mr. Ed Murrow then pulled the shade for the network on both conversationalists, one for being in his cups and the other for not knowing what cups were for.

“That was a better job of detonating the Art of Conversation than you did on Her Majesty's shipyard, Paddy,” I decided, “and a faster trip back from Liverpool, too.”

At I.R.A. Headquarters I was informed that Behan no longer carries his Sinn Fein conjurer's suitcase, and, indeed, has no present plans for blowing Lord Nelson off his pedestal overlooking O'Connell Street.

This news came as a blow, for I had brought along a camera and flash with which to catch the blind adulterer going sky-high about 4:00 A.M., as I understood that that is the hour that Behan is at his liveliest.

Needless to say, I had no intention of scaling the pedestal myself, because of the danger of falling off. There was no help for it—I would have to appoint someone else to the chore.

An I.R.A. officer wrote a name and address on a card, to which he referred as that of a youth of ancient Irish lineage whose mind had been touched by a year spent in the Department of Humanities at Yale University.

“The very man for you, and that's the lot,” he added, pushing me gently onto the street.

A man who had lived a year without seeing a human face made Behan's term in Borstal seem a jolly romp in a sunny meadow, so I hurried to meet this Dublin Valjean, by name John Montague, realizing that after such an experience the man would welcome a chance to go out as a martyr.

I was confident that my appearance at 6 Herbert Street would come as a complete surprise and I have seldom been so completely surprised. Mr. Montague greeted me with a warmth recalling the passion of Buster Keaton. “We don't want your Coca-Cola culture around here,” he welcomed me; “our Ancient Nation is not on the market for cool sound.”

“That's
my
ancient nation you're talking about, Bud,” I informed Mr. Montague, as I consider it my mission to defend culture even in its most curious forms.

“Let him in, John,” Mrs. Montague suggested; “a button is missing on his old weskit.”

“Can you sew in a doorway?” Mr. Montague asked her.

“We won't be able to warm up the house for half an hour,” she pointed out.

“Won't you come in?” Mr. Montague invited me.

I knew they would like me in Dublin.

Mr. Montague closed the door behind me; I stepped into a small but comfortable apartment; he opened another and I stepped through that into the backyard of MacDaid's Pub. Entering by a rear door, I had ordered a Guinness when Mr. Montague came through the front accompanied by a massively constructed, slightly stooped man of fifty-three wearing double-lensed glasses and an overcoat that would have made Charles de Gaulle a better fit, if De Gaulle didn't care what he wore any more.

“Meet Patrick Kavanagh,” Montague introduced the gentleman with the N.S.F. sign on his forehead.

Mr. Kavanagh squirrel-eyed me, then roared, “I'm a delicate cray-ture!” Where he had gotten the idea that I wanted to fight him I'm sure I don't know, but Kavanagh's voice is a foghorn gone mad. What it was when he had both lungs I don't care to consider but am content that I wasn't in Dublin at that time.

His voice is also that of the best Irish poet since Yeats. But he is a peasant, and has none of Yeats's grand self-dramatization.

He is the poet of the way it happened and the way it is; very close, in his celebration of man's ordinary hours, “the arboreal street on the edge of town” or the bleakness of a hospital ward, to Walt Whitman.

This is a poet to whom love is nowhere debarred. One who “the common and banal heat can know.” Yet he is no mere country bird watcher in love with the countryside: his reverence is as sophisticated as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

He is in praise of sensuality, of “the explosive body, the tumultuous thighs” where down some country lane he sees Miss Universe—“though she is not the virgin who was wise.”

Patrick Kavanagh, his poems inform us, is a poor man, a bachelor, one who has suffered illness and is acquainted with desperation. But who is saved by his gift of loving and the contentment he has drawn from undramatic days, where, “leafy with love-banks and the green waters of the canal” he finds redemption in the will of God—“in the habitual, the banal,” growing with nature again “as before I grew.”

“A sad thing,” I observed, taking care to make my voice sound weighted with melancholy, “to think that the Irish are vanishing.”

“Too good to be true,” Mr. Kavanagh decided, and began a headlong row with a bartender by demanding that his vanishing credit be restored by a check signed in Erse on an English bank. I shared the bartender's fear that the check would bounce signed in any language, and Mr. Kavanagh made no effort to defend the check's soundness. His view, rather, was that any bartender who would not help to force the English banking system to a decision on the legal acceptability of Erse was plainly a successful business man from Belfast. Kavanagh isn't called the last peasant poet of Europe for nothing.

These things matter in Eire, a country with an N.S.F. sign on her forehead.

“We want no part of the Twentieth Century,” Mr. Kavanagh decided as though I were forcing something on him; “we wish to belong only to ourselves.” It struck me that it isn't too hard a task to disassociate oneself from something to which one doesn't belong anyhow.

When the Guinness had begun to affect Mr. Montague's mind, I
inquired his frank opinion of Lord Nelson. He merely replied that he could live content without the monument overlooking O'Connell Street.

“If you scale the pedestal I'll get the gelignite,” I offered quickly, before he could back out of my trap. But I was overeager. Mr. Montague pleaded inability to scale the pillar upon which Nelson stands. It looked like shameless cowardice to me, one of the worst kinds that there are. I excused Mr. Montague with ill-concealed scorn.

“Don't
be a martyr, then,” I told him; “
be
an old stick-in-the-bog.”

“Not every Irishman craves martyrdom,” he replied, but I think he was exaggerating.

“‘They went forth to battle/ But they always fell/'” I quoted, “‘Bravely they fought and nobly but not well/ And on the hard-fought field they always fell.'”
¹

“A man belongs to himself,” was his reply, groping for Kavanagh's escape route.

“You belong to nothing but Guinness,” Mrs. Montague, strictly a non-escapist, only what was she doing in Ireland after having been born in France, told her husband. Then added, “And neither does this other pseudointellectual,” putting me in front of her broom as well.

“Nobody in Dublin belongs to anything but Guinness,” she went on, sweeping all reason aside; for they also drink whiskey in Dublin.

Mrs. Montague is the only person in Dublin who doesn't drink. Inasmuch as there is nothing in Dublin for a Frenchwoman to drink, this is not a spectacular virtue.

“Would you like some black pudding?” Mrs. Montague asked, and I began to dress for dinner immediately. If black pudding was to be the main course—just fancy what the
surprise-du-chef
would be!

The
surprise-du-chef
was that same black pudding, something that everyone ought to try on a day when everything else goes wrong. It explains why no restaurant on earth features Irish cooking. Simple: there is no Irish cooking.

“It's too bad the French didn't win Ireland,” I observed; “at least they would have taught you people to cook.”

“We cook very well,” Mr. Montague insisted, “we merely lack the in-gray-dients.”

I hadn't thought of that.

So we walked as night was falling to see the swans come down The Grand Canal.

They came like ghosts of swans, silently, one at a time.

John Montague spoke the name of each as it passed, softly, in some tongue I had never heard; as though he had known each when they were men.

Through the perpetual dark green mists that forever abide, we walked the banks of The Grand Canal.

“That tree looks like a palm,” I observed to John Montague.

“That is because it
is
a palm,” he informed me.

I had not known palm trees grew in Dublin.

They do. It has something to do with the Gulf Stream, and they are the only things in the town that aren't potted.

When we returned to 6 Herbert Street, I succeeded in wedging myself into the doorway with Montague, so as to preclude being left outdoors. But the doorway of 6 Herbert Street is narrow and we were wedged so fast that neither of us could move despite a good deal of shoving. Mrs. Montague had the presence of mind to butt her husband in the small of his back, thus breaking the wedge, and I came in second.

Montague, once I was inside, became his old gracious self, opening a door that looked as if it led to a guest room but didn't.

“The last time I went through that one I wound up between Patrick Kavanagh and a bartender,” I reminded my host, stubbornly holding my ground. “How about that
other
door?”

“Why don't you try it and find out for yourself?” he invited me, a peculiar huskiness in his voice.

“It's raining out, John,” Mrs. Montague reminded him, and opened a passage through which I passed and, what do you know—I was in a wee bedroom with a wee bed where a wee fire burned in a wee stove, with wee bars on a wee window! I always like a window with bars as it keeps creatures of the night from seizing me in the dark.

That night I dreamed I was walking up a ramp to board a plane, and saw an Aer Lingus stewardess at the top of the ramp who smiled down at me with a look so steady I understood she didn't like flying anywhere without me.

I was strong for joining her, and tried to hurry. But it's a tiring climb up a ramp that has no end with the old sky darkening.

I had time only so long as the steady girl kept smiling down. “Haven't you flown with me before?” she asked, extending her hand for mine to touch—and dream stewardess, dream plane, and dream turned slowly onto its side at a very great height.

To leave me adrift in those perpetual mists that forever drift: along the banks of The Grand Canal.

 

It rained all night and it rained all day and then Mrs. Montague said, “It's time to have fun,” and I thought so myself.

Only, how would a thing like that be done in a rain-sodden black-pudding town?

On a sea that just
might,
some night, swallow all down, Ulster and Belfast, the orange and the green, shawlie and culchie each alike, bogman and Fenian both the same, doubting priest and believing doubter, lovers of Jesus and lovers of Joyce, the National Farmers Association along with the
Amharciann na Mainistreach?
So long as I did not hear them keening from forty fathoms down I would not mourn too long.

Yet in such a great wash Siobhan McKenna might also be taken, and for that reason alone I stand firm as Bray Head against Ireland being washed into any sea.

People who find it hard to put up with the Irish should consider, for one moment, the job Brendan Behan has had his whole life with no relief but for a few years in Borstal. And there were Irish there too.

“The Last Dive of Dublin” was the name of the fun-place we found. A dozen aimless-looking women and girls sat about two jukes, one green and one white; as though all had been waiting for days for someone to come by and drop a dime in the coin box. If this is a dive, it came to me, Ireland already has vanished.