Life is always somewhere else

In the early 1960s, I abandoned the town of my birth and moved to Dublin. The word "discard" is appropriate. For the first 18 years of my life in Wexford, I thought of it as nothing more than a staging post on my way somewhere else. I have so little interest in this town that I can't even be bothered to remember most of the street names. If I had to imagine a word to describe my indifference to my birthplace, to its history, and to the complex and nuanced lives of its inhabitants, it would be not just "arrogant" but "stupid" and "wasteful." In my surroundings there was a world interesting enough to warrant the attention of an artist (from the earliest days I had no doubt that I would be an artist of my own) -- and this was abundantly evident in the writings of writers born in Wexford. Colm Toibin, Eoin Colfer and Billy Roche were among them. These three men, and Roache in particular, had minted large amounts of valuable money out of what I regarded as base metal -- I did not even care to look at it.

I can defend myself -- indeed I don't even think such a defense is necessary -- by saying that wherever I happen to find myself in life, I have never paid much attention to my surroundings, artistic attention, to be more precise. For better or worse, my primary concern as a writer is and has always been not so much what people do - which, as Joyce said (with his usual Trader Joe disdain) can be left to journalists - but what they are. Art is the constant effort to see through the small, everyday human actions to discover (or at least to explore as much as possible) the nature of existence. It is as legitimate for the artist to explore the question of existence as it is for the philosopher to explore it -- as Heidegger acknowledged when he spoke of his own philosophical thinking, he only wanted to find in it what Rilke had already found in his poetry. There is no doubt that he's thinking of the "nine of du ino lamentation" (verse - in some antique but lovable leishmaniasis, spender translations -- the beginning of the poem ask us, why on earth are born, why live, so here I am also dared to quote this beautiful prose poetry as an answer:

... Because it is abundant, because everything is here

Seems to need us, the dead

It's strangely relevant to us. We, the dead among the dead.

Every time, just once. Once is the end.

We also once, never to return.

But this time, just once:

The ends of the earth in, can seem 裭 duo.

But now, when I look back on all the things I left behind in my early years, and think about the indifference and ruthlessness with which I left it all, I am filled with a feeling that is not sadness, but something like it. I left a place I thought was harsh and mean, but it was actually gentle, it was just too wrapped up in its own hopes and sorrows to bother much with me.

The first thing I left behind was my parents. They lie in a mirage of memory, too far away, like a pair of fallen statues, the quicksand of time gathering beside them, the winds of time obscuring their faces.

I've never seen my father in a hurry before. The older I grew, the more this curious affair affected me, and intrigued me. Of course, he must have hurried on occasions when it was necessary, but even if I had seen him, I could not remember him. His life had been very smooth and uneventful, for his time, his class, and his age had all restrained him in every way. There was really no time when he needed to stride forward.

It's dizzying to look back at your parents' lives and compare them to your own. I was struck by the realization that when my father, at the age I am now, had just set foot in his dangerous seventies, he had long since retired and was entering his old age more or less peacefully. My mother was more resistant to the encroachment of age and infirmary -- in her 50s, she had the courage, rather boldly, to buy her first piece of what were then called slacks. My father was puzzled and, I suspect, alarmed, for he could not understand this extraordinary liberation-seeking gesture. But in those days, he had always tended to be "a stick in the mud of small-town life," and my mother had always wanted to drag him out of the mud.

A few years ago I came across a Department for Work and Pensions survey - surely there was no news in the papers that day - which found that among its respondents, women thought old age began at 60, while men, poor fools, thought it began at 58. These figures surprise me, given that most of us can now expect to live much longer; But I'm sure they won't surprise my father, or even my mother.

In her more irritated moments, my mother would remark that her husband had been born old. That assessment is unkind and not necessarily fair. I think what makes him seem prematurely aged is the narrow range of things he wants to do. He spent his life in white collar work -- though he wore a brown coat over his suit, shirt and tie -- in a large garage, supplying motor parts to many parts of County Wexford. But ironically, he never learned to drive. But he was a fast walker, and if I focused, I could hear again the peculiar clattering rhythm of the heels of his patterny shoes on the pavement outside our house.

In the morning, he walks to work, which takes about 20 minutes. At lunchtime, he would walk home, eat, read the newspaper for a quarter of an hour, and then walk back to work. After work at 6pm, he would cross the road from the garage to his brother's pub for a pint of Guinness before heading home for his "afternoon tea". For nearly 40 years, this schedule did not change, except for the summer months when the rest of the family moved to the seaside while my father commuted morning and evening by train. At the time, I accepted this as a necessary form and schedule for his life, but I wonder now how much he resents this daily routine, the monotony of which makes him feel so much like a lost opportunity and a lost happiness.

But maybe I was patronizing enough to find his life boring. What seemed depressingly dull to me might be a comfort to him, and might be preferable to the futile struggle that afflicted so many around him, including my mother. The old minstrel Philip Larkin wrote a lovely poem called "Next, Please," which begins by lamenting our childish thoughts about what life must have in store for us:

Always looking forward to the future. We

Got into the bad habit of expecting.

For my mother, life was always somewhere else, and for me, too. She reminded me, too, as I often did myself in my Wexford days, of Chekhov's Irina, confined to the provinces but entranced by the magic of Moscow. Yet, like my father, she was forced to live by a formula. She is a housewife. Being a housewife was a job -- though she had never thought of it as one -- and she did her job well. She goes shopping "in town" every morning, except Sunday, when no shops are open. Except on weekends, she goes to the grocer's, greengrocer's, butcher's, bakery... I wonder how many shopping bags she has broken in her life of "campaigning for information".

I don't have to doubt my mother's level of dissatisfaction any more than I have to doubt my father's. While she has to be Stoic about disappointing results in most cases, there are moments when she erupts in frustration and complaint. She's more widely read than my father, so I think she's more aware of what the world elsewhere has to offer and what she's missing.

She was an avid fan of "Woman" and "Woman's Own." I don't know what these magazines are now - I hope they are not because the public obsession for the soap opera characters of fiction and fruitless love story out of the way of life -- in a subscription to that stage, my mother are the main concern of the royal family, knitting patterns, steak pie, and at that time the staple food of ultra modern prawns, cold food diet. They are all completely harmless publications, although my sister insists that one April Fool's Day, one of them ran an article headlined "Make Yourself a cute Dutch hat". I had no doubt that my mother would not understand the joke. In fact, probably no one younger than myself would understand it now.

The two magazines were much the same in content and tone, and for my mother they were a touch of color in a dull time. Then one day in the confessional, for want, I think, of a minor offence to be readily admitted, she mentioned to the priest that she had subscribed to these two magazines -- he was probably inquiring whether she was keen on reading what he called "obscene books" -- and he immediately ordered her to stop buying them, on pain of mortal sin. When I was about 15, I argued with her that the priest was a fool who didn't know what Women and Women themselves were, Probably think of them as sister titles to "Titbits" or -- dear Lord -- the News of the World. My argument had no effect. My mother was as obedient as a church daughter, canceling two magazine subscriptions and no longer being able to keep up with the health of the Queen's Welsh corgis or the latest trend in Christmas cake decorating.

My mother must have been in her forties at that time. Can you imagine a middle-aged woman succumbing to such a ridiculous and fussy injunction now? Even in Ireland, where many Catholics see it, the church, for all its efforts, has not completely discredited itself. The world 50 years ago was very different from ours.

As I ruminated on the rigid pace of my father's life, it occurred to me to comb through my calculations. In the past few years, I have been to America, North America and South America, and Europe, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Greece, Poland and Estonia - there must be some other destinations, but I have forgotten - who know flying thousands of miles, and thus continuous suffer from jet lag. Such a journey would have exceeded not only my father's imagination, but even my mother's, who would have been incredulous, and would have chastised me harshly for showing my tiredness and listlessness about the possibility of travelling to some other far-off place in the coming year.

When I was young, I didn't think my parents were young or old. It seemed to me, until the last years of their lives -- and I'm not sure how old they were -- that they were basically creatures of a different species, immutable, just there. I don't recall ever noticing signs of aging, even after I moved to Dublin and visited "home" less and less often. It seems to me that they are trapped in a time-impervious zone, preserved in permafrost that is - for me - beginning to become the past. Did my mother, like the women in the British survey, think she was old at 60? Did my father hear the distant death knell when he was over 58?

More and more, I want to know what they think of me. I think, when I was a little boy, I'm not tired, at least my mother spoiled me - but when I was teenage, I doubt everything about I must annoying: selfish, discontent, indifference and demanding, arrogance, and arrogant just set up to me in my own one day will be the achievements of exaggerated estimates. I must be such a bore, especially to my mother. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, she knew and tolerated me more than my father did.

I left home cruelly, with an air of indifference, shaking the dust of Wexford from the heels of my shoes, and headed for Dublin in the splendor of my eyes. For my parents, it must have been sad to see me walk so indifferently, barely glancing back. I'm their last child, and they're all that's left of what was once a family of five. How lonely my mother must have felt Monday through Friday afternoons, because she could never wait for me to come home from school, no matter how surly and tacitly I might be. I imagine her watching the winter darkness creep closer across the fields in front of our house, knowing that she will never see her dream place now. Later, she and my father, late in their lives, did move to Dublin, where they shared a house with my helpful and forgiving brother. But I thought it was too late: Dublin was not Moscow. In fact, it was not the Dublin she had dreamed of, because that Dublin was only a dream.

By the time I was 35, both my parents had passed away. I mourned them, of course, but how much of my mourning was for them, and how much was actually for the first vague sense of my mortal fate that suddenly seemed very real? They died as kindly and humble as they lived. One brilliant golden afternoon in September, my mother died of a heart attack while feeding the birds in the garden. A few years later, my father died quietly in a nursing home. I remember hearing the news of his death and thinking: Now I'm an orphan. By then, I was married with children of my own, and the idea of being an orphan, if a little absurd, was compelling. Something -- I call it less cruelly a burden -- something has fallen, like a cliff into the sea, and I am more relieved.

My youngest daughter, 19, was also, like me, the last child, and she drank endless cup after cup of tea, the spitting image of my mother. Plus, wherever she goes, she prefers to walk rather than take the elevator or bus. Watching her walk out into the milky morning light one recent day, I noticed something familiar about her gait -- she walked quickly, leaning to the left, her left foot turning out a little with each step. I wonder who walks like that? It was only when I turned my face and noticed the rapid syncopated rhythm of the heels of her shoes on the sidewalk that I suddenly heard the memory of my father's footsteps. The dead always take the form of the living to convince us that they never left.

...

In Dublin, I settled directly in the heart of Bagteonia. By then, my southern aunt had moved from her bleak, cramped quarters in Percy Square to a gorgeous, run-down flat on Hill Street, where she lived, first with my sister and then with me. The unit, which occupies the entire third floor of a four-story Georgian terraced house, has two huge rooms with soaring ceilings, high push-down Windows and 18th-century wood floors. The floor was so frayed and dangerous that it jolted like a trampoline under the slightest of the hill Street coats of arms, the Dublin stampede.

To install a temporary kitchen, the front room of the unit has been partitioned off, destroying the original elegant proportions of the room. It's always a little scary to look up at the carved plasterwork under the ceiling and see it suddenly stop when it hits the partition wall. The back room, my bedroom, was untouched -- it seemed to have been since the 18th century -- and it was too big to heat: many winter mornings I woke to find ice on the inside of the eight-foot window next to my bed.

The unit has two entrances, one is the main door and the other opens directly from my bedroom to the landing. This means that when I leave in the morning or return in the evening, I don't have to walk through the front living room. My aunt kept her bed there, which served as a sofa during the day and was so knobbly that for years to come no girl I brought to the flat would agree to sit on it, let alone lie on it. The living room had a large round dining table whose original French varnish had dissolved into a thick black glue, and four crumbling, curved wooden chairs that protested loudly in dismay when anyone sat on them. A sideboard the size of a hippopotamus occupies the entire wall opposite the window, topped with the grey marble you'd see at a funeral, and backed by a wood-framed mirror of the good old days before the First World War. In the dim and mottled depths of the mirror, my reflection would loom. Strangely, there was a hint of malice in that expression, like Jack the Ripper.

I wonder what we're burning in the living room fireplace. Coal or peat, of course, or both - but where do we store the fuel and, more confusingly, how do we remove the ash? So many details emerged from memory, like the coins that rolled out of my trouser pockets as I hung them over the back of the chair next to my bed at the end of another youthful, drunken evening. I have never understood the charm of the Bohemian life. Moral corruption is moral corruption, no matter what time, no matter what age, no matter young or old. When I gifted the Uphill Street unit to my protagonist, Quirke, in a crime novel written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, I dressed it up rather nicely.

In the spring and autumn we let the furnace sit idle and make do with an electric stove with only one hot rod. Do people use electric stoves nowadays? Do they still make them? To my fanciful eye it looked like a gaudy flytrap, crouching in the clearing of the jungle, its red tongue tantalizingly exposed. I remember, though, that it made good bread. I remember the stretchable metal toaster forks we used to fork slices of bread, an ancient tool of unknown origin, black and shiny from constant use.

It's strange that I remember so many trivial things, but forget so many important ones.

Our first-floor neighbors were a spooky old couple: the man was a small, wiry man with a stubby mustache that Hitler would not have sniffed at; The woman is a timid creature, wearing floral dresses all year round, and -- unless my memory is playing tricks on me again -- a jewelled gilt tiara, which resembles a rhinestone tiara. If anyone entered the house forgetting to close the front door with feathery silence, her husband would leap out like a beagle and complain about the noise, which he claimed was a serious disturbance to his wife. Which was odd, since he also claimed that his wife was "too deaf to hear anything". I don't know if it was real or just his fancy -- I suspect he was a little deranged -- because in all the years I lived there, the poor woman never once said a word to me or gave me a reason to say a word to her.

The top floor of the house, the floor above us, was overrun with - that is the only proper word - a family of provincials of peasant origin, to judge by their accents and manners. How or why they came to live in the city is another mystery of the mysterious house. It is impossible to estimate how many people are upstairs because the number changes from week to week. I suspect this unit is like a miniature Ellis Island. Ellis Island, an Island off New York City, served as an immigration checkpoint for the United States from 1892 to 1943. Was the first trestle for immigrants from the countryside to settle in the city. Land "escape" in those years, more and more young people give up their family cultivation farm, moved to the city, and they are due to the bottle the arrival of the era of the so-called become restless, and be tempted to yearn for city TV ads, radio and television stations began to broadcast in the 1961 NianChuXi Ireland. A few years later, a prominent reactionary and -- not incidentally -- anti-Jewish politician, Oliver J. Oliver J. Flanagan, who declared in Parliament that there was no sex in Ireland before television. People sort of understood what he meant, and while most of us, especially young men like me, were still anxiously awaiting the arrival of promiscuity, Mr. Flanagan seemed to see it flourishing all around him in a blatant way.

The head of the group at the top was a thin, spirited old man, and I never knew whether he was an old father or a young grandfather. He used to sit in the stairway in the evenings, quietly playing jig and reel and sweet and sad slow songs on the violin. He was kind and quiet, and clearly still haunted by thoughts of his lost or abandoned "home." He had a worried, haggard young wife -- if not his wife, then his daughter -- and sons, or Cousins. They were large, somber men who would pass me rudely and shyly on the stairs. Most memorable, however, was a girl of fifteen or sixteen, an ethereal beauty with blond eyes and tawny limbs -- hardly a match for the saucy young Miss Lake of Percy Square -- a sexy but slightly older Lolita with that sulky, surly attitude, Nabokov counts this attitude as one of the first prerequisites for a truly sexy girl. I don't know how such an astonishingly lovely creature came to be born into that perfectly decent and decidedly unbeautiful country family -- but on the other hand, my dentist assures me that something in my gums is irrefutable proof that I'm Inca blood, Inca blood!

For a while, I believe, this older Lolita, she was obsessed with me -- I found my name scrawled in crayon on the inside of the front door, with a heart pierced by an arrow -- and who knows what would have happened to us if she had been a few years older? Then she became a successful fashion model, and now and then I saw her picture in the newspapers, or on the cover of one or two magazines printed on single-light paper that this country could boast of at that time. She was still beautiful as an adult. But to my regret, an important aspect of her beauty evaporated with the dewdrops of her youth.

She had a loyal bestie, a cheerful, plump little man who snorted with suppressed laughter whenever she stared at me. One day, years later, I walked into Parsons on the Bridge in Baggett Street and there was the little woman, old but still plump, standing at the counter. I could see from her eyes that she still thought I was a very funny person.

But wait, in retrospect, suddenly there was another possibility: Was the crush on me, the beauty upstairs, or her pudgy friend? After such a long time, it almost doesn't matter, I know, but...

The most famous tenant of the house in "Hill Street" -- the word "up" will henceforth be omitted except when explicitly expressed -- was Anne Yeats, the daughter of William Butler Yeats. She lives in the flat below ours. She was tall, shy, myopic, middle-aged, a good but boring painter whose fame was good, but not lasting. She was friendly and unpretentious, and she and I would occasionally stop on the stairs to talk about the weather, or the poor state of the plumbing in the house, or about the Jehovah's Witness who visited us every week with such enthusiasm and persistence. He wore a belted raincoat and a fedora, and spoke with a distinct Cockney accent that reminded "Miss Yeats" -- as she always had been to my aunt and me -- of a swindler straight out of an Ealing comedy.

The strangest thing you can observe about Miss Yeats is that she receives two ounces of fresh Yeast a week, delivered directly from the Dublin Yeast Company in College Green. I would look at the tiny brown paper packets left by the postman on the hall table and wonder what Miss Yeats wanted with such a large and endless supply of fresh yeast. She didn't make bread with it -- otherwise we'd smell it baking -- and I can't think of a way she could have used it in her paintings. Nor can I imagine the daughter of William Butler Yeats, the Nobel laureate and polemical member of the Irish Senate, running a microbrewery from her bedroom. Another unsolved mystery in the history of Shangshan Street 30.

One afternoon I met Miss Yeats outside her flat. Standing beside her was a little old lady, wearing a woolly hat that looked like an upside-down flowerpot, a long heavy coat, and large glasses. I passed in a whisper of greeting, and the old lady turned to look at me -- just calmly, without asking questions, without saying a word. I had the impression that her eyes were dark, almost black, and strangely kept looking at me. A chance encounter on the stairs with a young brat should hardly warrant such a glare. Decades later, I was commissioned to review Ann Saddlemyer's excellent biography, "Becoming George: The Life of Mrs. W.B. Yeats (Becoming George: As I flicked through The photographs in The book, my mind immediately returned to The door of Miss Yeats's flat that afternoon, and I shuddered, suddenly realizing who The woman was who had turned to look at me with eyes that should have been blank, but were not at all.

George Yeats, "Lady William Butler," as she was known during her long widowhard years, was famous for her hospitality and tireless advice and encouragement to a whole generation of Dublin writers. Just before my generation of writers arrived and tried to squeeze them out, that generation of writers thrived, hoping to use the right words. As I gazed at the picture of Mrs. William Butler in Professor Saddlemaier's book, what struck me most powerfully, what shook me most, was the vividness of my memory. I saw again the way the old lady looked at me on the landing all those years ago. I have always been suspicious of George Yeats's "automatic writing", and her husband encouraged and valued her ideas. Just living within the confines of that extraordinary gaze -- some say her eyes are blue, others, myself included, insist they are black -- is enough to inspire any poet, even one as great as Yeats. I still feel a chill ripple on my spine when I recall stumbling across those photos and being shot again by such a sharp glance from the past.

...

I lived with my aunt for two years, sometimes very comfortable, but more often uncomfortable, until, very suddenly, she died. She has for years been suffering from angina pectoris, one night, sitting in a nice jewish couple home on the sofa, she sometimes look after their children, she quietly broke, don't disturb anyone, so that the children playing at her feet didn't notice she was gone, until their father came in, and found her lifeless lie down there, at peace, I hope so.

At that time, I in the Greek island, my family, they are all feeling of alder, are trying to contact gets island (Mykonos) on me, but you don't succeed, so when I was in the sun tan, tan hair also has the Aegean sea salt crystals back home - in the era of advocating disheveled hair, we have many long hair! I was in a trance when I received the bad news. I didn't believe it. She was so full of life, how could she suddenly die? Now I recall her irreverence for authority, her characteristic cold gaiety, her wild laughter, her contempt for the false pious and prim fools who ride over us. I remember the lamb chops she used to lovingly make for me. I remember the fur ankle boots she loved to wear winter and summer. As I recall, she knew Audrey Hepburn's father, who lived in Fitzwilliam Square, and who was -- I'm sure she'd be surprised to learn -- an ardent supporter of the Nazis. I remember those nights, so rare, when she and I would sit in front of an electric stove with only one hot rod and bake bread and talk... Talk about what? It's in the past. It's in the past. When I arrived at my sister's house from the airport that night to hear the news of our southern aunt's death, I was young and heartless, and the spiritual liberation found in Greece was more real to me than the death of an aging relative.

Forgive me, dear old aunt. Forgive the young brute, and I'm sorry to say that I'm still a beast in the face -- I'm old now, or at least getting old, but the devil inside a man is always young.

...

I was spared a lot of trouble. When I returned to my unit on Hill Street, half my mind was still on that rocky island in the indigo Aegean Sea -- McNorth was still an unspoiled paradise, with no airport or paved roads. My kind, and -- in my case -- suffering sister came to clear out Aunt Nan's belongings. I'm supposed to be the one doing the hard work, I'm supposed to be the one suffering the emotional turmoil. But, no, I was the baby of the family, the sheltered one, who had to escape from the more terrible pains of life.