Algren at Sea Read online

  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.

  Or did it ever truly exist outside of the few Days of Easter Week, when it came onstage and then went off; having presented a drama, if not a revolution, to a world that has always loved Irish theatricals?

  Waiting for the fun-things to begin, I danced with Mary, a girl of twenty, who was going to America to work as a domestic “in a place called Pasadena.”

  “I’m fed up here,” Mary told me, putting my cap on her head to pretend she was now having fun.

  I might as well tell you right here that, when she did that, we had both had the peak of the evening.

  “I hope you don’t get fed up with Pasadena,” I voiced a hope while concealing a doubt.

  “I’m already fed up with Pasadena,” she told me; “I hate the very sight of the place.” Under the cap her eyes turned inward to a dark hollow no Pasadena would fill.

  It isn’t hard to see how a young person would feel fed up with a nation unable to offer its young women more than a life between the shafts of old drudgery’s two-wheeled cart forever going uphill and then the snifflers coming around saying, “She’s happier now she’s in Heaven.”

  “. . . for such is the condition of man in this old world (and we better put up with it, such as it is, for I never saw much hurry on the part of priests in getting to the next one, nor parsons nor rabbis, for the matter of that; and as they are all supposed to be experts on the next world, we can take it that they have heard something very unpleasant about it which makes them prefer to stick it out in this one for as long as they can).”

  —writes the man who was once forced to a very hard choice between his nation and his faith.

  I was reaching for a drop of wine when the glass was snatched from my hand by the proprietor’s stout wife, seizing all glasses empty or full, out of hands of drinkers thirsty or dry. Under the tables went the lot. Everyone sat up straight as in church with nothing before them but ashtrays.

  Two inspecting officers entered from offstage, where they had been waiting their cue. Now they were seriously bent on discovering evidence of drinking in teetotaling Dublin.

  This isn’t the last dive, I thought; it’s simply the end.

  The officers inspected the ceiling, clothes racks, flowerpots, tabletops and juke boxes without finding evidence.

  Everyone in the bar felt pleased with himself, after the officers left with a warning, for having outwitted the law. It struck me, however, that the Dublin Police Department is not so well organized as that of Chicago, where an owner would have had a full hour’s warning of a raid instead of ten minutes.

  Then the music began and the dancing began and the drinking began and the singing began, with the green juke taking the lead— Goodbye, goodbye, County Mayo

  “Fed up,” Mary repeated, “everything.”

  But this time just to herself.

  I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen They Must Have Made Angels in Ireland for My Mother Came from There—the whole tinpan vale of Glocca Morra, along with the Vale of Tralee, doesn’t work anymore. The young Kathleen Mavourneens as well as the Mikes pack up overnight and leave Dublin as though they had never had a friend there; and never write home as though they had never had a home.

  “Gone to America” is the word some leave chalked on a broken farm-house.

  Broken farms left to turn to earth on the great unused stretches of Irish land that there is none to work.

  “Gone to America” is the unseen legend left above the Dublin tenement door where some girl who says “Fed up,” gets fed up at last.

  Ten millions of people once lived in a country that now supports less than half the population of Chicago: a people whose fresh magic was a wonder and a light are going into that good night.

  The Germans, whom the world could better spare, may bring in neighborly little Volkswagens to distribute from Ireland’s ocean ports, to make more work and better pay for many Marys and Mikes, as well as effecting great savings for German enterprise.

  If The Ancient Nation says good night in a Volkswagen, that will be a prettier sight.

  I can’t wait till Mary sees Pasadena.

  Dublin is part city and part high-noon sky whose clouds as white as ocean sails veer changefully between sun-wave and rain across a changeful sea.

  Till evening cracks Heaven with the sad hues of old stained glass. Then mad saints long-martyred, and the memory of them among men, seem equally cracked. This twilit sky is the work of painters of holy dusks, everyone drunk or cracked. However so holy, all drunken.

  All cracked.

  To subdivide this sky for television, partition it for air rights or pierce it with a skyscraper, partakes of blasphemy here. But “blasphemy is the comic verse of belief ” the aphorist Behan comments. The Irish are already sufficiently apprehensive about the world about them. Though they name their apprehension reverence.

  So when the low roofs are huddling in the cold like shawlies at prayer, bolder souls go to MacDaid’s to challenge pope, priests, and saints—it is dark in there and MacDaid won’t inform on them.

  Dubliners divide their lives largely between pew and pub. Some are faithful to both, going drunken to Mass and atoning later in Guinness.

  “If a man is horrified by another’s sins,” Behan believes, “it is because he is uneducated, inexperienced and a hypocrite. Certain things must be restrained in the world for our convenience—but for our convenience only. Why can’t we let it go at that?”

  I had come to Ireland at the time that the Liverpool whores were coming over the water to see Ireland whip Wales at rugby. The subject of the day, everywhere, was Ireland’s chances.

  It was a very important contest, I understood from Mr. Montague, because of the present low state of Irish morale, what with Scotch outselling Irish whiskey in New York. Yet, in the highly unlikely circumstance that Wales should actually win, please to bear in mind that Gaels, true Gaels, never play rugby at all. That being a sport devised by British begrudgers.

  The Irish squad was therefore made up wholly of players from the North Counties, every begrudger of them a Black Protestant. Thus a victory by Wales would be a blow to Ulster: hence a triumph ardently to be hoped for by true Gaels. It was by now quite plain that no one in The Floating Ballroom could lose, whatever the result of this crucial contest.

  Then again, what did it matter who won between Protestants? Either way, Eire was in.

  Beneath their certain faith that Ireland could never lose lies a faith equally certain that she must finally fail.

  “The Floating Ballroom” was so named by Behan’s Aunt Maggie, who was present, as well as was Behan’s mother and that star of American television, Brendan Behan himself.

  Aunt Maggie occupies a special fame in Behan’s heart, as she does in hearts of others, because of her moment of truth, where the dead lay against the dead before the P.O. Then she materialized in the midst of gunfire to inquire of her husband, among the holdouts inside, “Are you going to work this morning or not, Mr. Tremble?”

  Mrs. Behan recalled another occasion when Behan had given her ten pounds and she had subsequently been so deceived by Guinness that she had wakened wearing only one boot. “It’s a lovely drink,” she assured her glass that she held no hard feelings for its deception.

  Nevertheless Ireland has a very good rugby team despite the fact that true Gaels don’t play rugby. They pla
y Gaelic football, an entirely different diversion.

  I didn’t ask whether the Irish Gaelic football team had yet won a match, as I was outnumbered.

  The capture of the American liquor market by Scotch whiskey, while Irish whiskey has failed to scale the wall, struck Mr. Montague and Behan as a monstrous irony, since Irish drinkers in New York outnumber Scots at roughly fifty to one. What were the people of The Ancient Nation drinking in New York bars for the love of God, both men marveled.

  “The last time I saw the Oak Room Bar,” I recalled, “the people of The Ancient Nation were drinking Drambuie. The only customer drinking Irish whiskey was wearing kilts. But, since you raise the question, I once knew a man named Guinness who would touch nothing but champagne.”

  “That’s surely odd,” Behan remembered; “I once knew a man named Champagne who would touch nothing but Guinness. “

  The great game of The Floating Ballroom is to discover a triumph of Irish sporting life to redeem the country’s economic defeat.

  In this I tried earnestly to help by recalling my father’s memory of John L. Sullivan and how proud Dad had always been of having once shaken the hand of The Boston Strong Boy, for had it not been for my father grasping his hand, The Boston Strong Boy would have fallen on his face, he was then that weak from the drink.

  The company appeared curiously unimpressed by this colorful legend from life’s other side, so I told how my own mother had once taken me, a mere tot of eight, to hear Honeythroat Reagan sing If He Can Fight Like He Can Love / Good Night Germany!

  My friends remained unmoved.

  Then there was Kenny Brenna, I added, for I perceived that my friends were eager to hear more, who used to sing O Why Did I Pick a Lemon in the Garden of Love / Where Only Peaches Grow? And Doyle the Irish Thrush!—a fantasist who billed himself as a heavyweight pugilist but was retired after knocking himself out on a ringpost at Madison Square Garden and yet he married well.

  “It’s a lovely drink,” Mrs. Behan observed.

  “I’m also a friend of Roger Donoghue,” I now clinched some lasting friendships, “the last Brooklyn-born fighter whose father still speaks with a brogue. In fact I was at ringside the night Donoghue was knocked out by Solly Levitt.”

  “It is not a momentous occasion for a fighter to get knocked out,” Mr: Montague observed.

  “For anyone to get knocked out by Solly Levitt was a most momentous occasion,” I was forced to correct Mr. Montague.

  Although it was a day of driving wind and slating rain, with fog coming in from the sea and mist coming up through the floor, it was sunny enough in The Floating Ballroom withal, and the sun shone even more brightly at news that local parties had thrown a sleeper across the rails of the train to Belfast and derailed it that same afternoon of slating rain. Every time the I.R.A. tosses a sleeper across the rails in hope that whoever gets his back broken may be from Belfast, The Ancient Nation is that much closer to unification, I gathered, looking at my Guinness a bit closer.

  “You don’t necessarily achieve a goal by stepping directly toward it,” Mr. Montague sensed my doubts. “Look at the Algerians.”

  I hadn’t realized until that moment that the F.L.N. was going about matters indirectly. Yet I had gotten wind of an address made in French by Behan, appropriately enough on the Rue des Martyrs, demanding that the F.L.N. begin to emulate the I.R.A. Meaning, I take it, that they should give more thought to the possibilities of dramatizing their revolution for the European stage. Less people get hurt onstage than in street fighting.

  “We’ve been banjaxed,” was how Montague put it.

  “Fughed,” Behan explained, “from a height.”

  Run over by the British economy like a truck over a biscuit tin.

  For the Irish dissipate their violence. They make war like the American Indian, like schoolboys, blowing up monuments that no longer stand for anything and then going home; as though unable to sustain a hostility. They upset everyone with their skirmishes, while the English keep a general goodwill on their side by the control they exert over their own violence. The fact is that the English are a much more violent tribe than the Irish, but the Irish have all the bad manners.

  “I can tell a Protestant half a mile off by his walk,” Montague disposed of all issues in one.

  “O death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling,” I hummed, “O grave where is thy victory?”

  “If that tie is el-ectrified,” Montague accused me, “when is it going to light up?”

  “I’m told the Irish are a vanishing race,” I replied, “but I don’t see anyone here leaving.”

  “She has one son dead and the other vanished”—Mrs. Behan nodded toward Aunt Maggie—“vanished.”

  The great Irish trick is to take care to hate most that which is farthest; so as not to be obliged to do anyone harm. Had the wise old warning, “Hit him again, he’s Irish,” not been invented before Brendan Behan was born, it would have been needed at that moment. Where most men have a chin Behan has a challenge attached to a face constructed deliberately for provoking blows. Thus it deploys defiance while concealing pity. And hence his intellectual belief in the class struggle is modified by his emotional conviction that the only class is Mankind.

  Not so many people get hurt that way either.

  “I was nearer to them,” he tells of the English inmates of Borstal who, like himself, had come from working-class homes, “than they would ever let Ken be. I had the same rearing as most of them, Dublin, Liverpool, Glasgow, London. All our mothers had done the pawn-pledging on Monday, releasing on Saturday. We all knew the chip shop and the picture house and the fourpenny rush of a Saturday afternoon, and the summer swimming in the canal and being chased along the railway by the cops.

  “But Ken they would never accept. In a way, as the middle class and upperclass in England spend so much money and energy in maintaining the difference between themselves and the working class, Ken was only getting what his people had paid for, for he was more of a foreigner than I, and it’s a lonely thing to be a stranger in a strange land.”

  For some reason unclear to myself, I launched into a long discourse on the career of The-Man-Who-Could-Throw-Harder-Than-Anybody—one Boom-Boom Beck—an athlete who pitched for the Chicago Cubs in Hack Wilson’s day.

  “Boom-Boom could throw so hard,” I told the company around me, “that if he hit you on a fingertip you’d go down. He could throw so hard that his catcher never had to use signals. There was nothing to signal for. Boom-Boom had no drop, he had no slider. He didn’t even have a nothing-ball. He just threw harder than anyone else on earth.

  “Sometimes he threw so hard the ball got past the batter, and when that happened the backstop would be pulled onto his hunkers by the impact.

  “Fortunately for the Cubs’ catching staff, this seldom happened. The bat itself, it seemed, was what Boom-Boom was aiming at. Boom-Boom’s throw would streak back like a falling meteor into the right-field stands. In event of a direct hit, it would zonk against the big white E that topped the center-field scoreboard. If a batter ever caught the pitch square it was almost as sure as mortar fire to kill five or six workmen tarring a roof two miles away. Well, that was why they called him Boom-Boom.”

  The company remained unimpressed.

  Another thing Mr. Beck had in common with Mr. Behan, that I did not mention, was that if he wanted to have a drink, he was going to have a drink. And if he wanted to have two drinks, he was going to have two drinks. And the more drinks he had, the more stubborn he would get; the more stubborn he would get, the more drinks he would have. And the more drinks he would have, the harder he would throw the next day for being that mad at himself for having been so stubborn the day before.

  And, of course, the harder he would throw, the harder he would get hit, and the harder he got hit, the more he wanted a drink, and if Boom-Boom wanted a drink he was going to have a drink and if Boom-Boom wanted two drinks—his manager summed the matter up in one phrase —“He looks like a twenty
-game winner between line drives.”

  Yet nobody managed Boom-Boom, least of all himself.

  No one, least of all himself, manages Brendan Behan. “The first duty of a writer,” he has expressed the conviction, “is to let his country down. He knows his own people best. He has a special responsibility to let them down.”

  “I once had occasion to drink with Dylan Thomas about the time God got him by the short hairs,” I recalled. “I asked him why he hit the stuff so hard and he said he didn’t know. But I’m still sure that the world at the bottom of a whiskey glass is a different world than that at the bottom of a cup of tea.”

  The Dublin house painter with the fighter’s mug leaned across the table and touched my tie tentatively, with a faintly incredulous smile. I pressed the bulb in my pocket and it lit up fine.

  He lifted his glass, holding nothing but water, and clinked it against the Guinness in mine.

  “Fugh the bedgrudgers,” was Behan’s toast.

  The Irish have a very good rugby team.

  That was soundly thrashed by Wales.

  The following morning I walked up the ramp of an Aer Lingus plane and was pleased to see, smiling good morning down at me from the top of the ramp, an Irish stewardess waiting there expecting just me.

  “Haven’t you flown with me before?” she wished to know.

  “No, Baby,” I told her, “but I’m ready to fly with you now.”

  Farewell, picturesque Dublin, quaint metropolis of Old Erin, where the poor contrasts with the very poor and the old contrasts with the prehistoric. And the fairly sober contrasts with the stinking drunk.

  Adieu and farewell, bustling capital where the world at the bottom of a glass of tea contrasts with that at the bottom of a glass of Guinness.

  Goodbye, County Mayo, goodbye.

  THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND

  THEY WALKED LIKE CATS THAT CIRCLE AND COME BACK