The Pornographer (3 page)

I am impatient for the jostle of the bar, the cigarette smoke, the shouted orders, the long, first dark cool swallow of stout, the cream against the lips, and afterwards the brushing of the drumbeat as I climb the stained carpeted stairs to the dancehall.

I check myself in the mirror but I am already well groomed enough, except for a dying flush, for both the bar and the dance, and with a shudder of relief I go out, leaving the light burning beside the typewriter and pages on the still marble.

As soon as I came through the swing door I saw him against the smoked oak panel at the far end of the bar, his pint on the narrow ledge, puffing on a pipe and staring meditatively into space. Space mustn’t have been all that absorbing for he woke and began to greet me with over-active flourishes while I
was still feet away. He was in his all-tweed outfit, long overcoat and matching suit, gold watch-chain crossing the waistcoat which had wide lapels. The small hat was tweed as well, “English country”, and much the same colour as the coat and suit, a dead briar brown. The bow-tie was discreetly florid and the highly polished oxblood boots positively shone.

“Ahoy, old boy,” he mimicked an English accent quite unsuccessfully. “What’s it to be?”

“A pint.”

“Another pint when you have the time there, Jimmy,” he called to the barman in his own voice.

“A Colonel Sinclair lived down the street from us. Every morning he’d come down for his
Times
and ten Kerry Blues. ‘
Times
and a packet of dogs,’ he’d shout as soon as he’d come through the door. ‘
Times
and a packet of dogs.’”

I wondered if his imitation English accent or the ordering of the pint had triggered the story. “You look ridiculous in that gear.”

“Tweeds are in, old boy,” he was not at a moment’s loss. “And besides, your good Harris, well treated, will last forever, unlike its masters.”

“You’ll get like Grimshaw,” I countered poorly.

“I wouldn’t mind a bit being the old Colonel. Very exhilarating, I should say. Except I have hardly his constitution. No matter. One of the reasons of art’s supremacy is just because of the very limitations of life. There will be no art in heaven. You should know that, old boy, you university types. Did you bring the family jewels along?”

“As usual,” I handed him the pages.

“Up to your usual high standard, no doubt,” he flipped through the pages. “Ireland wanking is Ireland free. Not only wanking but free. Not only free but wanking as well.”

It tripped out easily, like the well-worn shoe that it was; but once he began to read he was silent.

He, too, had ambitions to be a poet once, in the small midland town where we first met, he a reporter on the local
Echo
, I just out of university, a temporary teacher of English at the Convent Secondary School. Such as he and I who worked in the town but were not from it were known as runners, and all runners of any standing lodged at Dempsey’s Commercial Hotel—Maloney, myself, a solicitor, four women teachers, men and women who worked in the banks, a poultry instructress, the manager of the flour mill, and the whole of the A. I. station, its five inseminators and the two office girls.

All spring and summer Maloney had gone out with Maureen Doherty, a local postman’s daughter who worked in Dr Gannon’s office. Sometimes they came to the tennis club but more often they went for long solitary walks into the country or along the wooded bank of the river. Maloney seemed always to walk a few feet ahead of the girl, lecturing on the books he’d got her to read, quoting reams of deadening verse.

“Nothing sweetens pedagogy like a little sex. Nothing sweetens sex like a little pedagogy,” Newman, the manager of the flour mill, nodded his sage head in Dempsey’s. “Except usually it ends disastrously with the pupil coming of age.”

Maureen was blonde and small and exceedingly pretty. Tiring of his strenuous self-absorption she threw Maloney over for a young vet who came to town that August and who had also taken up lodgings in Dempsey’s. Humiliated and numbed Maloney went completely into his shell that autumn, spending all his evenings in his room and it was even rumoured that he was writing a novel. Down at the
Echo
office his rows with Kelly the editor increased in ferocity whenever Kelly insisted on removing some of the “rocks” or “jawbreakers” Maloney was fond of using in his column, which were clearly acts of aggression against his readers, whom he despised and was fond of describing as “the local pheasantry, crap merchants and bull-shitters”.

And then one evening, drawing up to Christmas, he rounded us all up after the hotel tea—bank clerks, teachers, the solicitor, the poultry instructress, old Newman of the flour mill, the artificial inseminators, even the young vet, whose VW was
seldom seen in the evening without a happy-looking Maureen Doherty, and shepherded us upstairs to the big lounge where he had already a fire lighted. With much nudging, low giggles, scraping of chairs and feet he read his poem, in rhyming couplets, of lost love, seemingly oblivious of the blatant discourtesies. And no matter how loud they might scrape or cough no one could boast of having escaped the reading. When he finished, everybody applauded, relieved that love’s labours at last had ended.

Warmed by the applause he explained that there were two kinds of poets. One, having written the poem, would comment no further, insisting that the poem speak for itself out of its own clarity or mystery. While he respected the position he did not number himself among that persuasion. He was someone who was prepared to analyse every line or syllable, and he had no hesitation in admitting that the source of the poem was frankly autobiographical. He had been in love, had failed in love, and out of the loss had grown the poem.

He warned against the confusion between art and life. Art was art because it was not nature. Life was a series of accidents. Art was a vision of the law. Rarely did the accident conform to the Idea or Vision, so it had to be invented or made anew so that it conformed to the Vision. In short, it was life seen through a personality. Which brought us to the joyous triumph of all art. For, though life might be intolerable or sad, the very fact of being able to bring it within the law made it a cause for joy and celebration. Or, to put it more crudely, though in this particular autobiographical case the girl was lost, it was through the particular loss that the poem had been won.

Afterwards, impervious to laughter or ribaldry, he insisted on buying his whole audience a drink, even forcing the young vet who tried to make protestations that he had to be away to stay. With the same imperviousness, Maloney began his first pornographic paper, defied the obsolete censorship laws in much the same way as he defied the sense of embarrassment
provoked by poetry at Dempsey’s—by simply remaining oblivious of it—and made it a success against all predictions. And he’d gone on from there to become the rich and fairly powerful man he now was. I suspected he paid me the higher rate he did as much out of affection for the old times as out of any belief that I could manufacture those sexual gymnastics any better than any of the several other hacks he hired.

I ordered two more pints, placing the fresh pint beside his unfinished one on the ledge. He made small notes or changes as he read and I knew they’d all be improvements. Time was suspended as I watched him. I watched his face register the world of the words, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael. It is a chastening sight to watch somebody totally absorbed in a world you yourself have made.

“It’s good. As always. That’s what’ll juice them up. There’s just these few changes.”

He got curious pleasure from the changes, almost standing back to admire the line of the sentences, like someone admiring the true line of a wall he has just straightened.

“Nobody can stand anybody else, of course. You’re one person who really knows that, aren’t you? You just have to have someone you like stay in your house for a few days to find that out. It’s all got to do with room. But we can all stand a lot of the Colonel and Mavis,” and he began to tell me what to do in the next story. The couple should be split up in Majorca. Mavis should be given a bullfighter and the Colonel a brown-skinned Arab girl of fifteen or sixteen.

“You should write it yourself.”

“No. I’m too busy. And I wouldn’t manage it right,” he handed me a brown envelope.

“Thanks,” I could feel the notes in it as I took it.

“By the way, I’m expecting Moran any minute,” he named the most powerful newspaper man in the city. “You don’t mind meeting him?”

“Of course not. Why should I?” I was determined at once to deprive Maloney of his pleasure. One of his few new
pleasures since becoming rich was to spring someone powerful or famous on his ordinary company and to stand back and observe.

“You should have seen her crawl to impress him, indecent ambition suddenly all over the place,” he’d remark as if remembering a good wine. “One moment his feathers were all preened and the next completely drooped. It was like the effect a pike might have on a shoal of perch,” I remembered hearing him boast.

“You don’t seem very impressed. Or are you just hiding it?” he berated me now.

“I’m too old. And I know you too well. Besides, I have to go in a few minutes.”

“Where are you going to now? You seem to be always going some place.”

“To a dance. To the Metropole.”

“All the young whores and the rich baldies.”

“Do you want to come?”

“I have to go home after I see Moran. Dada has to say good-good night, tuck the hush-a-baby in, go to safe-safe sleep, or Mama will spank-spank,” he mimicked before adding sharply, “You seem to have escaped all that crack?”

“It’s just as bad without it,” I had time to tell him as Moran pushed towards us at the end of the bar, a large florid man in thornproof tweeds.

“I see you’re inflaming the people again. You better not get them too riz or they’ll turn wicked on yez,” it sounded so well polished that it was hardly the first time it had been put to use. “I was just on my way,” I said, and with apologetic clasps on arms I left before there was time for protest. “I’ll finish that for you in a few days.”

I stood and breathed freely a few moments in the rainwashed air outside, and then moved towards the lighted dancehall. As I drew near I saw three girls with overcoats and long dresses get out of a taxi and go in ahead of me through the swing doors.

The womb and the grave.… The christening party becomes the funeral, the shudder that makes us flesh becomes the shudder that makes us meat. They say that it is the religious instinct that makes us seek the relationships and laws in things. And in between there is time and work, as passing time, and killing time, and lessening time that’d lessen anyhow, such as this going to the dance.

There was a small queue in front of the ticket window when I went through the doors, the three girls in long dresses who had just got out of the taxi at its end. An even longer queue had formed by the time I was able to buy a ticket and a porter brought out a small easel and a pale red
House Full
placard, and left the placard one side of the easel, ready for putting up.

With the ticket I climbed the heavily carpeted stairs, running into another queue half-way up, which only moved every minute or so at a time, four or five steps, like disembarking from a ship. A man at the head of the stairs in full evening dress was the cause of this last queue, his black hair slicked back from handsome, regular features that had all the marks of an ex-boxer. As he tore each ticket in two, handing a half back, stabbing the half he kept on to a piece of wire, he stared into the faces like the plainclothes policeman beyond the barriers stare when a watch is being kept on the ports.

In the cloakroom a man was carefully hiding a bald patch with a comb and side of the hand. He was concentrating so hard that he did not even notice when I excused myself to get past him to the towels.

The band was playing to an empty floor, slowly, a foxtrot, the brushes caressing the drums. The four steps up from the bar left the dance floor just below eye-level. I sat in the bar, watched its pale maple on which some silver dust was scattered lie empty in the low light. After a while a blue dress swung past, followed by a steel-like trouser leg, the first couple started to dance.

None of the tables were completely free. I sat by the windows across from a young man with dark red hair and a winning smile who had already several empty glasses in front of him.

“You’re enjoying yourself,” I said to the red-headed man who was little more than a boy but looked more aged because of a weathered face. The hands were scarred and the nails broken.

“Just getting up some old courage,” he was too involved with his anxiety or fear to want to talk and we just smiled and nodded back into our separate silences. Far below in O’Connell Street toy cars were streaming past, and most of the small figures on the pavements seemed somehow comic in their fixed determination to get to wherever they were going. I saw the boxer in evening dress leave the head of the stairs. The
House
Full
notice must have gone up on the easel below. It was no longer possible to see onto the dance floor, the space at the head of the steps packed with men, and men on the steps below struggled to push through. Everywhere now there was the sense of the fair and the hunt and the racecourse, the heavy excitement of preying and vulnerable flesh, though who were the hunters and who the prey was never clear, in an opening or closing field one could easily turn into the other; and, since there were not many young people here, there must have been few in the dancehall who at one time or another hadn’t been both, and early as it was in the evening, if we could scent past habits and tobacco and alcohol, in all the gathering staleness, there must be already, here or there, in some corners, the sharp smell of fresh blood on the evening’s first arrowheads.

The redhead and I rose at the same time from the table which was immediately seized by the waiter for a large party of five or six couples who started to move vacant chairs away from half-filled tables.