History of the Rain (41 page)

After one such visit he asked me, ‘Would you like to walk along the road, Ruth?’

‘No.’

‘Ruth, walk Vincent some of the way home.’

‘He knows the way.’

‘Air will do you good.’

‘I have air. Look. Nice. Air.’

‘It’s all right, Mrs Swain. She’s right. I know the way.’

Good people are just horrible. You just want to shoot them.

‘All right, yes! I’d love to walk along the road.’

Walking Along the Road is the Faha equivalent of going to the cinema or the mall or the bowling alley in the real world. Vincent thought the road just marvellous altogether.

‘I can’t go any faster,’ I said, ‘So if you want to go ahead that’s fine.’

‘No, no. This is fine.’

I walked slower. But you can’t lose a fellow like Vincent Cunningham, he slowed right down. The rain was not rain he took any notice of. ‘Ruth,’ he said, ‘I’m hoping it’ll be soon.’

I mistook his meaning. I was in
Middlemarch
then, maybe I was dreaming he was Mr Casaubon, whose proposal Dorothea should have stamped on. But before I could say anything, he said, ‘Your dad’s poems. I hope he’ll hear soon.’

I did not hit him. Let me put that to bed.

I did not grab his ear and pull him to me and say ‘How do you know?’

Maybe my expression did. I am not responsible for my face.

‘I just wanted to say, I’m hoping it’ll be soon,’ he said.

Chapter 4

It was not soon. Soul-seeing in London was on a go-slow. Mam and I held our breath, and although, from both sides of our family, I had advantages in holding breath underwater, most days I knew we were drowning a little bit more. One day Mrs Hanley came. She was a small brown-eyed terrier with the plainspoken forthrightness of Cork people. Mrs Hanley had buried her husband, but it had taken nothing out of her. She got on with it, she said. The exact opposite of Eileen Waters, who had so far in this life successfully avoided making a direct statement, Mrs Hanley liked to hit a nail on the head. Now she was running the FAS scheme for the unemployed, and because she knew London had still not replied, and because like everyone else she wondered how we were living, by way of asking she told my father he had to join. The scheme was for the betterment to the parish so technically anything he could offer would be eligible.

What he offered was Yeats.

It wasn’t a joke.

I suppose he couldn’t resist. I suppose large dreams sailed their galleons into his brain and he had that kind of brain where strange is just normal in a bit of a storm. That Mrs Hanley agreed to it was maybe the more remarkable.

I can’t remember who said it, but it’s true that whenever anyone reads Shakespeare they become Shakespeare. Well, the same is true for Yeats. Take an afternoon. Sit and read his poems. Any, it doesn’t really matter. Spend an afternoon, read out loud. And as you do, sounding out those lines, letting the rhythms fall, following some of it and not following more of it, doesn’t matter, because gradually, without your even noticing it at first, just softly softly,
you rise.

You do. Honest. Read poetry like that and human beings become better, more complex, loving, passionate, angry, subtle and poetic, more expressive and profound, altogether more fine.

That’s what I learned from my father.

He was given a room in the back of the hall. Six classes. He needed the money but expected no one to come.

When he came in the front door of the hall there were people looking to find extra chairs. They didn’t say
We’re here because you’re the poet who has the book gone to London
, they didn’t say
We’re sorry your son died
or
You have to keep hope alive.
A higher form of English is practised in Ireland, and direct statement is frowned upon. Nods were passed as Virgil came in. Nobody took their eyes off him as he settled the
Collected Poems
on the desk, and in an instant, trait undiscovered until now but inescapable as his bloodstream, he lifted his chin like the Reverend, and began.

My father’s teaching style was as improbable as his nature. He stood behind the desk and looked out over the faces peering up at him. He allowed a pause that felt like a prayer, that felt like he was going to attempt this and he had no idea what he was going to say or how he was going to say it or if he even could begin. Then he began. He paced, back and over in the narrow space left to him by the chairs, back and over (six steps), speaking loud and clear off the very top of his head, which was above all of ours, and which it was not difficult to believe was just then exploding. He used his hands sometimes while he read, a kind of downward cutting, sharp, a chop, like that, and sometimes he’d say a line and be taken by the quality of it. He’d repeat it in a softer voice and you knew right then, right at that moment, he was discovering newness in it, and even if you didn’t know what exactly that was you knew you had arrived in a different country from the one outside that was just now discovering it was bankrupt.

The classes were theatre. They were not a one-man-show in the sense of either structure or performance, did not have any clear sense of progression, did not have pauses, did not adhere to any notion of making points or playing to the audience, but they were electric and before they were done were already becoming part of parish legend:
You won’t believe it, but once in Faha
.

Even on those four times I got to go and was stacking the chairs later for Colm the caretaker –
Eight in a stack, no more no less
– I knew there would be times in the future when someone would look shyly at me and acknowledging wonder with a gentle toss-back of their head say, ‘Do you know, I was at the Yeats.’

The more you hope the more you hurt. The best of us hope the most. That’s God’s sense of humour. Back then I hoped the soul-seers were coming to Clare. They were putting on their sunglasses, locking in the coordinates and setting out from Russell Square. Because, as Father Tipp said, there’s a religious twist – which may actually be an insoluble knot – in my imagination, I lent them the mute mystique of the Three Wise Men and dreamed them arriving, if not quite on camels then certainly with amazement in their eyes.

At night I prayed one prayer:
Tomorrow
.

Tomorrow let the word come.

I prayed to God, found God unsatisfactory because He had no face, and prayed then to Aeney. There was Swain logic to it. Lying under the skylight at night I pictured the prayers of the whole world rising. (TG there were time-zones or they would all be heading up around the same time, and Prayer-Traffic Control would be . . . Sorry, fecund.) I pictured them rising off rooftops, ascending against the rain, millions of them, vague and particular, a nightly one-way traffic of human yearning, and I thought surely they couldn’t all be
heard
? Surely they became just noise? How could He listen to that? Even just from Faha there would be the McCarthys, who had a Nan gone to the Regional, Mrs Reid, whose Tommy was having his heart opened, Maureen Knowles who had the bowel, Mr Curran, Sean Sugrue, Pat Crowe, all in Condition Uncertain in Galway, Patricia the Dolan’s mother who was starting chemo in the Bons. And those were only the ones I had heard. So, because Aeney was that part of me that was already in the next life, because he was fair-haired and blue-eyed and generally adorable, I decided he could be our Ambassador. He could carry the word and so to him I prayed.

Come on, Aeney.

But Aeney was elsewhere, and after four months of waiting Mam had me write a letter of enquiry.

‘We want something polite but firm,’ she said. ‘Maybe they need a slight push. We want to know if they are interested or if we should offer the book elsewhere.’

I wrote it neatly on blue letter paper.
Or we shall send the book elsewhere.
Mam signed it. When she put it in the envelope the flap wouldn’t stick. We never sent letters. The envelope was probably ten years old. She put it under
The Return of the Native
and pressed down. But still the glue wouldn’t hold.

Sometimes you have to defy the signs. ‘Go down to Mac’s and see if they have an envelope.’

Moira Mac was doing what she always did in this life, washing clothes. She had no envelopes, but took a Holy Communion card out of its white one and gave me that. I brought it back inside my cardigan. At the kitchen table I addressed it. ‘Say a prayer,’ Mam said.

The more you hope the more you hurt.

You drop a letter in a Holy Communion envelope in the postbox and already you are waiting for a reply. Human beings were built for response. But human nature can’t tolerate too much waiting. Between the emotion and the response falls the shadow, T.S. Eliot said, and that was the principle that inspired texting, that came up with the shortest possible time, basically as fast as Sheila Geary’s two thumbs could hammer ILY on a tiny keyboard and get Johnny Johnston’s ILY2 back, so that between emotion and response now there wasn’t all that much shadow.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are.

After the Yeats classes my father returned to writing. He had been renewed. A white electric urgency flashed in him. For the first time he broke his own rule about only writing after the work on the farm was done, and now he was at his desk when I woke and there again when I came home and there when I went to not-sleep at night. It was a flood of new work. It was pouring into and out of him quickly, swift turbulent river. His pencil dashed across the paper now, worked itself down to a soft stub. When the lines were blurry as if underwater the pencil was quickly pared, soft
whoo-whoo
, the parings blown, and the writing raced on.

‘Dad?’

Inside the hum he couldn’t hear me.

‘Dad, Mam says dinner’s ready.’

He wrote faster than I had ever seen anyone.

‘Dad?’

I broke the hum. He fell silent, and at last pulled back out of the poem, pencil still in his hand. I had the sense of his unplugging, and that it was both arduous and somehow regretful.

‘Yes?’ he said. Then again, ‘Yes.’ As if recollecting that Mam and I and dinner existed.

He ate little, and to remedy this Mam tried various stratagems, cooking his favourite, salmon of course, buttered & honeyed carrots with peas and potatoes, telling me a clean plate was the best way of thanking her, or announcing that she had ruined the dinner and was sorry that it was probably inedible, just to make him feel
I must try this for Mary
.

By the end of the week Mam decided it was best to keep a plate in the oven. He would come down when he was ready. We shouldn’t disturb him. My mother has a natural kind of grace, which is basically wisdom.

Many plates of charred food were taken from the oven, but I never heard her complain.

We were still waiting for the reply from London, but now it seemed less vital. Aeney had done it, I decided. He’d gotten the poems turned on and now they were coming in a way that did not seem humanly possible. My father was not wrestling with these. Even though I was not getting to read them, I knew. I knew from the moments of goodnight when I stood behind him waiting for his kiss on my forehead, when I watched him, humming and rocking, pencil flashing across the page, I knew that these were different, these were his life’s work. He still crossed out, wrote a line and rewrote it, sounding it that way he had where the sound and rhythm were present but you could not make out the words. He still turned the page fast and began on a fresh one.

But now there was joy in it.

As I have said, I’ve read every book I can find about poetry, how it’s made and why it’s made and what it means that men and women write it. I’ve read T. S. Eliot’s
On Poetry and Poets
(Book 3,012, Faber & Faber, London),
Poems of John Clare’s Madness
(Book 3,013, Geoffrey Grigson ed., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London),
Robert Lowell: A Biography
(Book 3,014, Ian Hamilton, Faber & Faber, London), Jeremy Reed’s
Madness, the Price of Poetry
(Book 3,015, Peter Owen, London), and the basic message is, poets are different to you and me. Poets do not escape into other worlds, they go deeper into this one. And because depths are terrifying, there is a price.

The price at first was thinness. My father forgot food. In a different biography it is here that he would turn to drink. It is here he might have considered recourse to the methods of Johnny Masters who started drinking early in the day so that by evening the world became tolerable. But because at Paddy Brogan’s wedding my father had drunk a glass of whiskey and shortly after thought people were trees, he knew drink would take him away and not towards the thing he wanted to capture.

He grew thin. His arms grew longer. Inside the open collar of his white shirt there were ropes and cords of tendons in his neck. His shoulders were sharp and made of the shirt a sail.

I do not mean to say he ignored us. Certainly he did not intend to, and there were moments when, like discovering a butterfly on the back of your hand, he stopped in the kitchen, looked at me the way no one else ever did. It was a look that loaned you some of what he was seeing, a look that made you feel, I don’t know, transfigured.