Algren at Sea Read online

  Soufflé Grand Marnier would be the surprise-du-fry-cook, Fatty announced. And taking up a deflated balloon, he began stretching it in a fashion that might not have been suggestive had he not shut his eyes and the balloon not been as pink as skin. With his mouth open and his tongue deriving pleasure from the touch of his own lips, the effect sustained was definitely one of minor rapture. I simply couldn’t see why it should be necessary to put all that into so simple a task as balloon-stretching.

  “I take it you’ve been at sea a long time, sir,” I suggested in a friendly tone, implying that nobody could have achieved such sureness of touch in handling balloons who had stayed on dry land.

  Fatty blew the balloon up, tied it, and volleyed it toward me in a taunt as contemptuous as it was gentle. I fought down an impulse to push half a banana into his puss and say, “Call this tangy.” As it was, I had no choice but to volley the object just as gently back. But if I didn’t get the hell out of there before that soufflé arrived, I realized, they would find me hiding in the hold writing “Catch me before I kill more” on the underside of a turbine. All I wanted was to be alone with the smoldering remains of my Smith-Corona.

  I fumbled with the belt that held me to my chair. The waiters were clearing the tables of dishes bearing the remains of haddock, eel, salmon, whale, sole, clam, whitefish, oysters, octopus, herring, crabs, and swordfish and here it was only the middle of the week. Would there be enough left out there to go around come Friday? Well, no news is good news.

  I was still trying to unstrap myself when the ship hit a long swell; the duke’s chair with the duke in it started sliding downgrade away from the duchess—yet how proudly the old man held his little dish of creamed spinach high as he went! Like a man who knows too well how much spinach is left in his life and being careful not to lose a drop. Two waiters rushed to retrieve him, though it struck me that they might just as well have walked. Then, as they almost had him, the back-swell took chair—duke, spinach and all, sliding him right back to where he belonged. The duchess didn’t look up.

  She didn’t know he’d been gone.

  But the duke held his little dish high to show everyone he hadn’t spilled any. There was a polite scattering of applause. Meyer Davis’s aides burst into an encore of Bluebird of Hoppiness. I got free at last.

  “Won’t you wait for the surprise-du-chef, sir?” Goldbraid Fatty inquired politely as I stood up and the others eyed me strangely, “—it’s tan-gy.” Closing his eyes, he let his mouth hang in order to run his tongue across his lips.

  “I’m going up on deck to look for Moby-Dick, sir,” I explained. “The moment I see white water I’ll let you know.”

  That night I dreamed that every passenger aboard, first class, second class, tourist, and cabin, all sat at some gala dinner at the same long board. I saw Goldbraid Fatty rise at the head, strangely promoted to Captain.

  He did not speak, but chewed some pink sort of gum instead, with a fork gripped firmly in his right hand. Chewed slowly, with a theatrical effort, exactly as though the point of the occasion, the reason for this assembly of right-thinking persons, was to study the procedure of a ship’s captain in the chewing of pink gum.

  Then I sensed, with a slow apprehension, that there was more to it than this. For a meaningful bubble began to form on our Captain’s lips, that grew into a pink-skinned balloon. With a snap of his tongue like a command to all hands, the officer took his lips from the balloon and blew lightly to launch it. It floated straight up, as in Zero-G gravity, and I think that at that moment we all felt a little weightless too. For every eye followed, as every eye knew, that whether the ship were to continue on course or to plummet to the bottom taking down all hands, depended upon our Captain’s next move.

  And with one firm stroke he plunged the fork into the balloon.

  It did not burst. It gently deflated yet did not fall. It held itself above us by a special chemistry, turning itself slowly into a barely visible dust. Never growing smaller yet ceaselessy spilling: a barely visible green-gray dust. Over flowers long faded, over favors age had dried, over fruit decayed to a scatter of seed and faces gone eyeless in their dry skulls; that since time out of mind had been those of our Captain, the Rear-Echelon Radical: Mrs. Di Santos: The Connecticut Child.

  And downward and down through deeps ever darker, sun-green to death-green to ultimate black, in the shroud of the waters I felt the hull seeking its sea-bottom home. I felt the hull touch, that gradual impact: then the slow cutting sand-spraying slide through coral and anemone, along the sea-drifted sands.

  And lost in vast oceanic ages where, wandered by waters where no fish swim, the voice of the duchess came to me grieving:

  “What are your plans now, Daddy-O?”

  THE BANJAXED LAND

  YOU HAVE YOUR PEOPLE AND I HAVE MINE

  Flying the Irish Sea by Aer Lingus on a secret mission for the Irish Republican Army is serious business, especially so when the I.R.A. hasn’t been let in on the plan. Although my papers, consisting of a signed photograph of Victor McLaglen and a character recommendation from ex-Mayor O’Dwyer, were cleverly concealed in the spare battery of an electrified jazzbow tie purchased on Forty-Sixth Street, I remained outwardly calm despite the altitude.

  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— “And before he faced the hangman,

  in his dreary prison cell,

  British soldiers tortured Barry,

  Just because he would not tell,

  The names of his companions,

  And other things they wished to know,

  ‘Turn informer and we’ll free you’

  But Kevin proudly answered ‘No’. . .”

  “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—“The boys of the column were waiting

  with hand grenades primed on the spot

  And the Irish Republican Army

  Made muck of the whole mucking lot”

  —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 h
is 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.

  “So be reposed and praise, praise, praise

  The way it happened and the way it is.”

  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 min
d 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.