Cassandra Voices

Author: Bob Quinn

  • The Conman and Correspondence with Kurt Vonnegut

    I admire old people who live by their wits, like the ancient American, a real estate man, whom I met in Galway years. He wore a badge on his lapel with the slogan:

    OLD AGE AND CUNNING WILL ALWAYS DEFEAT YOUTH AND TALENT.

    He told me he was eighty. He looked sixty. We had some laughs.

    As well as that real estate man and my pig-breeding Granda, I admire the old conman I encountered in Montreal railway station in 2003.

    He was elderly, frail, perspiring. He approached me at 8.00am as I queued for the transcontinental train. He had a worn telephone directory in his hands.

    ‘Excuse me, sir. Can you help? I’ve lost my reading glasses, can’t make out this telephone book. Prints too small. Ya know what that street outside is called? I think there’s a branch of my bank there.’

    ‘Afraid not. I’m just visiting’

    ‘Ah.’

    He surveyed the other prospective passengers, rejected them and turned back to me.

    “I’m from outa town too. Been playing poker here all weekend and lost my shirt. Can’t even pay the left luggage fee. I’m trying to ring my bank but they don’t answer. I probably got the wrong number. Sir, can you find it here, the First Bank of Montreal? D’you mind ringing it for me?’

    I found the number, abandoned my luggage to the next person in the queue and followed him to the booth. As I dialed the number he prattled urgently.

    ‘What am I gonna do? I’m in deep shit if I can’t get to my bank.’

    There was no reply from the number. Then I remembered.

    ‘It’s Monday,’ I told him sympathetically, ‘Queen Victoria day, a bank holiday.’

    He was shattered. My heart went out to him. But he had an inspiration.

    ‘Sir, could you lend me a coupla dollars so I can get my luggage back. I always leave some cash in it, my fare home. I’ll pay you back in five minutes. Or maybe, hey, look, this watch I won a while back. It’s a Rolex. Worth five hundred dollars. I’m desperate. I’ll give it you for a hundred.’

    He pulled the watch off, pushed it into my hand. I shook my head. He then struggled with a gleaming ring on his finger.

    ‘This is my wedding ring. 14 carat. My wife will be mad but I gotta get home.’

    I realised it was a con, the jewellery was rubbish, but I was admiring his technique. An old man, still a consummate actor: the sweaty forehead, fogged glasses, shaky hands, lines delivered with perfect timing, especially the question that established me as a stranger to Montreal. I love actors. I took the cheap Woolworth’s watch and ring as souvenirs, gave him thirty dollars. When he skedaddled, effusively grateful, I checked that my luggage was intact, thanked its minder and reported the incident to a couple of Mounties in the station. I told them I was glad to reward the old actor’s performance but was worried that some kind old lady who couldn’t afford thirty dollars might also be conned. The Mounties laughed and said they’d look out for the man, but it was needle in haystack time.

    Several times, on the three-day train journey to Edmonton, I took out the cheap watch and ring and wondered what kind of fool parts with his money as easily as I did. On balance I decided my largesse was the equivalent of a cheap theatre ticket on Broadway and the real life performance was quite as absorbing.

    ‘a mere political bauble’

    I shared the 3-day train journey with American pensioners availing of the cheap rate of exchange between Canada and the USA. I still thought of him, that old survivor. I also tried to figure out my real motive. Was I afraid to call his bluff, break the illusion he had constructed? Did I want his role to be real? Am I incurably gullible? Do I still prefer illusion to reality? Why do I think losers are the real winners?

    Another old man I encountered was Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), author of Slaughterhouse 5, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, PlayerPiano and many other masterpieces which were resolutely anti-war. He never earned a Nobel peace prize which is the reason I have always regarded that Prize as a mere political bauble. However, on November 11, 1999, the writer’s birthday, an asteroid was discovered and named in his honour. It was called 25399 Vonnegut. Kurt’s consolation prize is located in the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, circling the sun every 4 years 2 months approximately.

    Vonnegut was a foot soldier against Germany in the second World War and was a prisoner of war in Dresden when it was bombed. Subsequently he wrote anti-war books. A Hollywood producer once told him he might as well write anti-avalanche books.

    Vonnegut was proud of his German ancestry.

    Kurt Correspondence

    In June, 2003 I found his address in New York and wrote a note to him:

    22.6.03

    Dear Mr. Vonnegut,

                                        I finally got this address from Bill Keough – I hope it’s the right one.

                                        This is just to say thank you for all of the encouragement – apart from the entertainment – you have provided for me over the years. I still re-read your books when I’m down. Then I can laugh and cry again.

                                        I wish they’d given the Nobel Peace Prize to the ‘old fart who smokes Pall Mall’ (as you describe yourself) or the man who invented the Church of God the Totally Disinterested or even to your marvellous invention, Kilgore Trout. Instead they give it to poets who sentimentalize, and scientists without the humility of your late brother (Pointing to his own head: “You should see what its like in here”)

                                        You are a treasure who keeps us on the brink of sanity – especially boring old fart-fathers like me who try to subvert my six kids with your ideas.

                                        .

                                        Go raibh míle maith agat.

                                        Very Sincerely yours

                                        Bob Quinn

                To my astonishment a couple of months later I received a postcard. On its front was the slogan: LIFE IS NO WAY TO TREAT AN ANIMAL. Written in block capitals on the back was:

                                                                    AUG. 29TH 2003

    DEAR BOB – I ALREADY OWED A LOT TO AN IRISHMAN BEFORE MY LIFE WAS SAVED BY YOUR LETTER, NAMELY G.B. SHAW.

    A NOBEL PRIZE TURNS THE WINNER’S BRAINS TO TAPIOCA, BUT LIKE JAMES JOYCE I SURE COULD USE THE MONEY.

             CHEERS

    (There was a self-portrait signed K.V. – 80 AS OF 11/11/02)

     

    Dear Kurt,                                                                              24/9/03

                            Thank you for taking the trouble to reply to my simple fan letter and especially for inscribing an original self-portrait. I now have the perfect bookmark for, of course,‘Cats Cradle’ which I have just begun again. I have also started smoking my pipe again (so it goes).

                            In my youth I read a line from ‘The Virginian’: “When you say that, smile”.

                I hope not too late I realise that this is your principal device, why you are what they call a genius and I am an ordinary crank: you – like Shaw – detail the most horrifying paradoxes about us, but with a rueful grin. By contrast, I am still into the anatomy of melancholy – my adolescent complexes will never be resolved, I hope. They’ve kept me going this far.

                Anyway, the sheer craft of your work will always keep it fresh; its audacity still makes me pause and exhale slowly. How did he do THAT, I ask.

                I have 13 years to catch up on you, in which to achieve your state of karass ( a nice version of grace) and to grin. I shall send you a birthday card for all of your next, many, eleventh of the eleventh anniversaries; it will be easy to remember, as my own window opened on the fourteenth of the eleventh.

                At the very least, sir, I share that dangerous characteristic with you: a Scorpio.

                God Bless you Mr. Rosewater.          

     

                Dear Kurt                                                                                           27th April 05

    As your next birthday card I am taking the liberty of portraying you as the deus ex machina in my new novel, one of a series of unpublishable fictions. I feel like your invention Kilgore Trout whose work ended up in pornographic books.

                I have placed you in a country called Ishkailand, a tiny, glacier-bound Republic which has a superabundance of mountain water. A bit like Ireland. This has made it rich in a dying, thirsting planet whose desalination plants have rusted because the oil has run out. The tiny country, location of OWEC (Organisation of Water Producing Countries) conferences, is nominally run by a failed poet/President who has a wife, the rejected daughter of a vile mountaineer goatherd who is going to precipitate an avalanche which will destroy the country – but I run ahead of myself.

                You are posing as a shabby old tramp but are in reality a wandering writer -you’ve discovered that writing, like crime, has only a tiny pension of satisfaction and have abandoned it for the quiet relief of painting pictures of edelweiss. But you are also a scholar and student of the Ishkailite aboriginal language – and I am not sure yet whether you will save this world and its people or say, the hell with them all.

    Is that okay with you?

    At this moment in the chaotic narrative, you are getting blotto with your exact contemporary the goat-herd father-in law who, like you, fought at Anzio, and you are both having a ball.

    Your fictional persona’s diagnosis of the planet’s problems is simply ‘a stack-up of tolerances’.

    That is the story so far – 60 pages! You have only yourself to blame. I hope to have it ready for your next birthday which will be three days before my 70th. I think they call it a festchrift.

    God save all here!

     

                                                                                            5/5/05

    HAPPY TO HAVE YOUR ADDRESS WHICH YOU FAILED TO INCLUDE IN YOUR PREVIOUS AND MOST STRIKINGLY FRIENDLY COMMUNIQUE. USE MY NAME OR IMAGE HOWEVER YOU PLEASE IN YOUR NEW NOVEL. I NEVER SUED ANYBODY AND NEVER WILL.

    LOVE!

              (signed with self-portrait and ‘82 as of 11/11/04’

    I next sent him a copy of a book of mine that was actually published: Maverick.

                                                                                    3.6.05

    I AM ENJOYING YOUR BOOK, AND KNOWING SOMETHING ABOUT YOU, AND BEMUSED AS WELL BY ITS TITLE, WHICH IS OF ALL THINGS THE NAME OF A TEXAN WHO DID NOT BRAND HIS CATTLE.

                                                      CHEERS! KV

     

    6/5/05

    DEAREST IRAQ:

    ACT LIKE ME. AFTER 100 YEARS OF DEMOCRACY LET YOUR SLAVES GO. AFTER 150 LET YOUR WOMEN VOTE. AT THE START OF DEMOCRACY ETHNIC CLEANSING IS QUITE OK.

    LOVE YOU MADLY!

    UNCLE SAM

     

    11th May 05

    Dear Kurt

                            This evening at dinner I was trying to impress my latest wife, who is 26 years younger than me and runs the world, by showing her your latest treasured postcard. She is also a fan.

                ‘Note’, I said, ‘Vonnegut has never been invited to ‘Cúirt’, that Galway mecca for international literary figures like Heaney, Proulx , Coetzee etc etc.’.

    ‘Cúirt is into people who are fashionable’, she said. ‘Why don’t we cut through the literary shit and get him to deliver a keynote address at the Fleadh.’

    She runs the Galway Film Fleadh, the only down-to earth-film festival in the world.

    ‘You could show the film ‘Breakfast of Champions’ which was an honest attempt’, I ventured.

    ‘Whatever’, she said. ‘Get him to deliver his anti-Bush onslaught. Film makers need shaking up. We’ll bring him here, put him up in luxury, give him a good time. Persuade him to come’

    ‘What about his photographer wife’, I asked.

    ‘We’ll look after her. She’ll protect him from fools’ she said.

    ‘What about me?’ I asked.

    ‘She’ll protect him from you, too.’

    So, Mr. Trout, there it is: an invitation. The Galway Film Fleadh is on from the 5th to the 10th of July (this year too). Have you ever visited Galway in the west of the country called Ireland, this figment of the American imagination?

                Mit besten gruessen

    14/5/05

    IT IS WIDELY CONCEDED THAT IRISH PERSONS ARE THE MOST MELODIOUS AND INTRICATE AND AMUSING SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. SO A GERMAN-AMERICAN APPEARING BEFORE YOU WOULD BE A DANIEL IN THE LIONS’ DEN. ALSO, I AM TOO EFFING OLD. BUT THANKS

    Kurt Vonnegut

    On the 26th May Kurt sent me a signed copy of ‘POEMS WRITTEN DURING THE FIRST FIVE MONTHS OF 2005’.

    One of his poems was titled Naptown, USA

    It was alright there in Indianapolis

    Where I was born:

    Jazz and serious music, law, journalism,science,

    Good food and jokes, sports, politics,

    Architecture, libraries, institutions of higher learning,

    People so smart I couldn’t believe it

    People so dumb I couldn’t believe it

    People so nice I couldn’t believe it

    People so mean I couldn’t believe it

    But for some reason

    I had to get out of there.

    The cost?

    At 82 I am a homeless man.

     

    3rd June 05

    Dear Kurt,

                After your ‘too effing old’ card I lapsed into contemplation of my own mortality.

                Now your 2005 poems have arrived and have dragged me kicking and screaming with laughter back to life. If you can keep on keeping on so acutely so can I – minus the brilliance, of course. Thank you. I can now continue writing.

                As you won’t be visiting, here are some images to show you what you are missing – a place not long and narrow like Chile – but I must say that its equally interesting living on an island shaped like a little puppy, begging on its hindlegs. Trouble is, to find the positive images and experiences illustrated, you have to go through a lot of touristic rubbish as well as increasingly draconian immigration barriers (unless you’re white) – rather like the reason I refuse to go back to the USA: ploughing through groups of fat, expressionless security people who approach me on the assumption I’m a geriatric suicide bomber.

                A late friend of mine, Reggie Howard (who had his brains dislodged in the back of a warplane in WW2, held them in with his hand and achieved Ripley’s Believe it or Not fame by surviving thus far ) told me that at the age of 68 he had laid an 18-year-old (female). This was my ambition until I passed that watershed last year and now all I can hope for is an encounter appropriate to my present age, 69, which mightn’t be a bad substitute. These giggly and desperate thoughts are suggested by your latest work – which gift has flattered and delighted me.

                What encourages me is that you are still highlighting our absurdity. I am accustomed to people of advancing age adopting an attitude of resigned hopelessness equivalent to the pragmatic despair of the young. Maybe the latter is a function of a small population like ours, whereas no matter what one’s opinion, there seems to be still room – and an audience – for anarchic thought over in Uncle Samland. Okay, Monkeyface ignores it, but it hasn’t gone away. And won’t, I hope, for a very long time.

                Wer schreibt, bleibt.

     

    14.7.05

    YOUR PRAISE OF ME DID NOT FALL ON DEAF EARS.

    LOVE –

    (Self-portrait)

    GIFT COMING!

     

    He sent me one of his paintings which featured the lone, framed word ‘sleep’ where the ‘S’ was elongated into a curving serpent. He signed it with his usual cartoon self-portrait and the words: ‘For the writer Bob Quinn, my best friend among the living.’ Never losing his sense of humour and irony, he was old enough to have seen most of his real friends die.

    28.Aug. 05

    Dear Kurt,

                            I enclose a book of pictures, the exhibition of which I just opened with words that include passing reference to you. This is becoming a habit.

                            Since our last communication I’ve been busy reading your oeuvre: Bagombo Snuff Box out of the library in Galway, read all the stories and felt like an archaeologist excavating the origins of your enormous talent. My favourites are Thanatos and 2BR02B but I enjoyed them all and saw how your agents persuaded you to tailor the ends to middle American ‘fifties taste, but leaving sharp prescient stings in various tails all around you.

                In Dublin this week I found Hocus Pocus and am getting a great kick out of it.

                I told you before that in the festschrift which I am writing I forced you to become very drunk with a stinking goatherd. I am beginning to suspect this is an uncharacteristic plot turn because I’m having difficulty sobering you up to launch another gentle onslaught on the assembled suits. They remind you of the 1950’s Berlin Congress of Culture at which Arthur Koestler spoke and which transpired to have been financed covertly by the CIA. (Note: The CIA also bought up a million copies of Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon’ and distributed them, free, throughout the world. That’s how best-sellers are made) I think I can sober you up fast this way.

                Your incitement to Sleep is much admired

    The next communication, an illustration of his irony and anger, was a copy of a letter he had sent to the Chicago paper In These Times”:

    TO ‘IN THESE TIMES’

    Dear Editor, If I may impose on your extraordinary hospitality yet again:

    I was on John Stewart’s Daily Show September 13th, and arrived with a compendium of liberal crap I never wanted to hear again, and my responses thereto.

    But I only had six minutes, and so never got a chance to read them aloud. For whatever they may be worth to you:

    “Give us this day our daily bread”    

    Sure. I’ll pay for it. Enjoy!

    “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”  

    Oh Yeah? Anybody trespasses on me, and I’ll cut him a new you-know-what.

    ‘Blessed are the peace-makers.”  

    Jane Fonda? Give me a break!

    “Love thy enemies.”    

    Arabs?

    Blessed are the meek.”  

    You bet! I love ‘em, too. I tell ‘em to kiss my ass, and they’ll kiss it.

    “No man can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”  

    Mammon , of course, is the god of greed and riches. And the hell I can’t serve both God and Mammon. Look at Pat Robertson! He’s as happy as a hog up to its ears in excrement!

                                                   

    (signed) Kurt Vonnegut.

                                                                                        10/9 05

    also

    12.10.05

    WE ARE A DISEASE SO, LIKE SYPHILIS WITH A CONSCIENCE, WE SHOULD STOP REPRODUCING.

    KV

    On the 1st of December Kurt sent me a Merry Christmas card consisting of a self-portrait drawn in silver paint on plastic. I sent him a dvd of my Romanian Quartet film documentary.

                                                                                        11th Sep. 06!!

    DEAR BOB:

    I LOOKED FORWARD TO BEING DELIGHTED BY YOUR VIDEO. BUT WHEN IT TRIED TO PLAY IT THESE WORDS APPEARED ON THE SCREEN: “DUE TO REGIONAL LIMITATIONS THIS CANNOT BE SHOWN.

    MY HEART IS BROKEN.

                                                    (Self-portrait, complete with tear)

               

    Dear Kurt,

    ‘I’ve got tears in my ears from lying on my back and crying over you.’

              I am more heartbroken than you especially as the DVD worked for two old pals in Missouri and NY city.

              I’ve spoken harshly to the Dublin copying studios and they explained thusly:

              The DVD will play on any computer anywhere but not on every TV set. A difference between old fashioned Europe and the good old USA is we can play American films on our TV sets but you can’t play ours on your sets unless the latter are dual capacity PAL /NTSC Tv sets.

    Ours are, yours aren’t. I presume its to stop our decadent frenchfried ideas flourishing over there.

              All I can suggest is asking one of your gracious kids to lend you their computer to look at the film. And I hope you enjoy it.

              Unfortunately I still drink (alcohol and coffee) and smoke like a trooper. However years ago a pretty young German doctor explained her similar bad habits to me as follows: the nicotine narrows your arteries, the coffee thins your blood so it’s a perfect metabolic marriage.

              I’m still trying to find a suitable denouement for your heroic role in my Ishkailand saga.

              My very best wishes to you and your local post office. I thoroughly enjoy the concentrated focus of your postcards. Would that I were so short-winded and long-focussed.

              When this summer I proudly displayed your Sleep etching to an ex-head honcho of United Artists (my wife brings stray dogs like that home sometimes, the type that is impressed by nothing) – he stared and murmured: ‘wow!’

              Your name is good everywhere.

               

    9/6/06

    I had the temerity to send Mr. Vonnegut a copy of my failed novel ‘The Accompanist’. He quoted at least one sentence of it and commented:

    3.9.06

    “I HAD AN IMAGE OF THE UNIVERSE AS ONE GIGANTIC CHORD, FROZEN IN TIME, BUT ACCESSIBLE THROUGH THE HEAT OF HUMAN EMOTION WHICH MELTED DOWN BITS IN THE FORM OF MELODIES, MERE GLIMPSES OF THE IMMENSITY BEHIND THEM.”

                WOW!   You got a major poem in a single senence

                                                                Kurt Vonnegut.

    Dear Kurt,                                                                              4th October 06

               

                To-night I showed your latest postcard to my 19-year-old and my 11-year old and asked them this question: Why would one of the greatest writers of the 20th century take the trouble to write out in block capitals a sentence from my feeble writing and add “WOW!’?

                The younger said: ‘He likes you.’

                The older said: ‘Solidarity.’

                I told them about your son Mark (?) who had various tough times and who told you that life was about helping each other to get through it – whatever it was.

                Then they wandered off to their multifarious activities.

                I mentioned your quote to the young Irishman in Syracuse who wanted to publish a ‘print on demand’ ‘version of ‘The Accompanist’ and he asked me could he put it on the cover and I said ‘Absolutely not, this is personal.’

                So, thank you. It’s about solidarity in our solitudinousness, if there is such a word.

               

    Death

                {{{Reason for over-wroughtness:

                My favourite son-in-law Islem, a 33-year-old French-Tunisian died suddenly on a visit to Lyons, France 10 days ago. I think he literally killed himself working to provide for the future of his wife,my daughter, and kids. We spent a week in Lyons, going through courts for the right to bury him in Ireland, near his wife and kids. His Lyons-based brothers wanted to bury him initially in Tunisia (from which he had escaped, aged 17, to join the French army. Although he was born in France, his father had brought him and the family back to Tunisia to avoid French decadence! Then the brothers wanted him buried in Lyons. My daughter, cool, calm, repressing her emotion (unlike me) won the case and the appeal in her fluent French. The funeral is in Bray, Co. Wicklow to-day.

                I asked a religious Moroccan friend for advice. Today, 10 days late, he sends me the following:

                “In Islam the whole earth belongs to Allah. He can be buried where he dies! ‘The sooner the better’, says the Prophet.”

                That’s a lot of help for a grieving widow.

                It appeared initially to to be a clash of civilisations and religions but ultimately transpired as a miserable pursuit of property. The brothers had their eyes on an apartment he owned in Lyons. There’s no accounting for human behaviour.

    The good news is that two other of Bairbre’s friends, also Muslims, stayed by her side the entire week. I asked them was there any physical danger. They said, we don’t know, but we are on a ‘jihad’ to protect you and your family. And they did.

    The west must learn this other meaning of the word.

    There is good and bad everywhere}}}

               

                God Bless you twofold, Mr. Trout.

    8/10/2006

                SOLIDARITY , OF COURSE, BUT ALSO AWE AT HOW MUCH YOU HAVE GIVEN A GUY MY AGE TO PONDER IN SO SMALL A SPACE.

                            WOW! – (as speech bubble coming from his self-portrait)

                                                                                                               

                                                                                                   

    11/10/06

    YOU PUT A MAJOR POEM IN A SINGLE SENTENCE.

    OK?

                            KV

     

    It was easy to remember his birthday, three days before mine.

    13.11.06

    Happy Birthday to you

    Happy Birthday to you

    Seventeen more await you

    Until we are through.

     

    A few months after my last greeting to him, Kurt Vonnegut fell down a stairway and died from multiple head injuries. I never met him in person. I wrote to his widow.

     

     

    Jill Krementz                                                                                      12.April 2007

    Turtle Bay

    New York

    Dear Jill,

    Forgive the familiarity. I am really sorry to hear about your loss.

    I feel bad too, like a child who has carelessly offended his father who then dies without a word of forgiveness.

    I treasure our occasional correspondence and the picture he sent me. I miss his birthdays and shooting the breeze but am consoled by his magnificent legacy of writing.

    Yours Sincerely

    Bob Quinn

    I received no reply. So it goes.

  • Lament for Áirt Uí Laoire

    In August of  1969 I was driving across Ireland with the late Bearnard Ó Riain, the older brother of a good friend of mine, the late Dinno Ryan. Most of my old friends are now ‘late’.

    We were going to join others in a mountain-walking weekend. Bearnard had participated in the nineteen-fifties IRA campaign in the North of Ireland, was captured and interned in the Curragh. He could not stand being locked up and he signed a statement renouncing his involvement in the IRA and undertaking to leave Ireland. He had gone to Africa, married an English girl named Carol, had two children and spent the next ten years there. The marriage had broken up and he was now back in Ireland to gather his resources.

    I switched on the car radio to get the news and we heard that the North had exploded again, that Orangemen were burning Nationalists out of their homes in Belfast.

    [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”3″ display=”basic_slideshow”]He turned to me with a look that said: ‘I have to go up there’. I knew that he needed some distraction from his domestic circumstance. I also suspected he needed to exorcise his old guilt at signing himself out of the IRA and I turned the car northwards.

    We arrived in Derry as the Rossville flats siege was ending. On the roof of the flats we met Bernadette Devlin. Bearnard asked her if we could help in any way. ‘You could help to clear up this mess,’ she said and we started clearing away the broken bottles and stones, remnants of Molotov cocktails.

    We found a bed for the night on the floor of RTE reporter Seán Duignan’s City Hotel bedroom. Word came that  there had also been serious trouble in Dungiven.  Seán was excited, predicting a civil war.

    Belfast

    The following morning we drove to Dungiven, which was now peaceful, recovering from a night of violence. It was all very anti-climactical. I later wrote an article which the Evening Press published with the title: ‘Trouble will always be where I am not.’

    The same applied to Belfast. The only sign that there had been trouble on Bombay Street was a lone figure whose bald head I recognised from newspaper photos as belonging to Joe Cahill. He was keeping guard with some kind of rifle.

    Bearnard and I acted like tourists and strolled up the ravaged street. Encountering some suspicious young men of whose allegiance we could not be sure we prudently claimed to be Canadian journalists. Our years of travelling had smoothed the rough edges of our Dublin accents so that we could pass ourselves off as harmless. 

    The following morning we investigated a burnt out factory on, I think, the Falls Road. Someone shouted ‘sniper’ and everybody dived for cover. I could not take it seriously and simply lined myself up behind a lamppost. If there actually was a sniper in the factory building, I reasoned, he would need to be a very good shot and at worst I could only be winged.

    But there were no shots. I was beginning to think the whole situation was quite exaggerated by journalists. Later that day we witnessed the first contingent of British soldiers taking up positions on the Falls Road and being applauded by the grateful citizens. What struck me was the nervousness of the lieutenant in charge and the gaucheness, the mystified expressions of the soldiers under his command.

    How were they – or we – to know that we were witnessing the beginnings of a Nationalist revolt and an occupation and vicious war that would dominate our island for the next thirty years?

    The above mentioned Bearnard O Riain lived in Johannesburg. He had written a most interesting memoir of his dramatic life. It opens with the scene of a drunken man kicking a woman lying in the gutter. To his horror, the writer realises that the woman is his wife and he himself is the violent drunk. Bearnard’s book is quite unlike my fanciful reminiscences. It is that unique object: a well-written, honest memoir. No publisher in Ireland was interested in publishing it.

    It would be five years before I again braved the North of Ireland, next time as  the guest of ‘Official’ Sinn Féin.

    Conamara

    By 1974 I was entrenched in a cottage in Baile na h-Abhann, Conamara where TG4 would be built over a score years later.

    A softly spoken man named Eamon Smullen called one day. He had the idea of making a film on the subject of the epic poem, Caoineadh Áirt Uí Laoire. It had been a favourite of mine in school. He could even offer some money to make it.

    I jumped at the chance. It took me six months to research, write and direct the film with an amateur cast entirely from the area. It took a few more months to edit and finish it. Essentially it was a tragic love story.

    The (true) context was a hopeless one-man protest against the Penal Laws imposed by the English in the 18th century. Joe Comerford and myself were the only crew with film experience, Joe on camera, myself on sound. My then wife Helen was the indispensable production support.

    When the film was finished, my neighbours – including the cast of the film – were a little bewildered by my quite unconscious use of Brechtian alienation techniques. This was a pragmatic solution to the problem of using an all-amateur cast. I needed to creep up on and defuse, audience prejudices against both amateurs and the Irish language.

    I did this by using authentic native speakers rather than urban Gaeilgeoirí and scripted it accordingly as an amateur rehearsal with roughly dramatic re-enactments. It worked very well because it offended the proper targets. When it was shown at the Savoy cinema in the Cork Film Festival, actors Niall Tóibín and Donal McCann happened to be seated behind me. At the end Niall tapped me on the shoulder and whispered: ‘Quinn, yer a clever hoor.’

    That was as fine a compliment as I could get and certainly took the sting out of the Irish Times’s Fergus Lenihan describing the film as ‘formless as the Connemara rocks.’

    Dermot Breen, Director of the Festival, was delighted to be offered the film – the only other Irish entry besides my friend Louis Marcus’s fine Waterford Glass job.

    Naturally I thought my baby was a work celebrating the genius of Conamara but, considering the pleasant expectations of film audiences, Louis’s beautiful cinematography won.

    Later, Dermot Breen who was double-jobbing as Irish Film Censor, demanded cuts to certain mild profanities in my English subtitles – e.g. ‘shit’ and ‘Jesus’. I refused and he confined the film to viewers over sixteen years. The Dublin premiere was launched by Síobhán McKenna in the Drumcondra Grand cinema in 1975 while I was having a quiet little breakdown.

    Dance Hall charge

    It also seemed a good idea to show it at the first night of our little ‘cinema’ in Carraroe in the same year. Although I was entirely to blame for the film the titles included a credit for the ‘Education Department of Sinn Féin’ of which Eamon Smullen was director and who had provided the £6000 towards its making.

    The war in the North was in full swing;  Sinn Féin was split into Provos’ and ‘Stickies’. I had no interest in either group, nor in the subtleties of North/South politics. All I saw was an opportunity to make a film about my favourite poem in Irish, which is still a landmark in Irish literary history.

    Oblivious to the political implications I went ahead with the job. But politicians have longer memories than their constituents. I had previously, on our closed-circuit video, made fun of the Minister for the Gaeltacht’s poor command of the language of the Gaeltacht. There were two political black marks against me.

    Thus on the night of the Carraroe showing of the film the local Garda arrived at the door asking to see my licence to show films. No such licence existed. The only legislation the State had ever bothered to enact concerning film was the Dance Hall Act of 1935. Nobody could dance in our cinema because the seats were bolted to the floor.

    The Garda, a decent man named Rice, mentioned the suspicion that  I was raising funds for the IRA!  I was summonsed to appear in court on the Dance Hall charge. It was a petty case of political harassment and the Garda was the messenger: don’t mess with the Minister, the message said.

    The Case for the Defence

    George Morrison of Mise Éire fame brought a sample of old flammable nitrate film as an exhibit in my defence. This was the dangerous stuff for which the British had legislated in 1904 and which had long fallen into disuse. 

    George intended to ignite an inch of it and detonate it in court as a smoke bomb – a game we had played as children. The demonstration would show the difference between it and the modern safety film which I handled.

    Perhaps fortunately, George did not get the chance as the case was summarily dismissed with no blot on my escutcheon. Nevertheless some of the mud stuck and forever afterwards I was considered locally to be somehow not politically kosher.

    Officially, I was bordering on the subversive. When some maverick IRA man named ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchy was being sought high and low throughout Ireland there were only three houses searched in Conamara. One of them was mine. The Special Branch found and formally confiscated a child’s popgun which did not work.

    Belfast drinking club

    President Cearrbhaill O Dálaigh had a private peek at the film in the Project Theatre in Dublin and wrote a complimentary note to me. Film critic Ciaran Carty had kindly described it as ‘the Irish film I for one have been waiting for.’

    But the film was not really respectable until the Northern war was over. It has never been shown on RTE but TG4 is more daring and have shown it twice. When Channel Four showed it they cut out the credits for Sinn Féin. Meantime Eamon Smullen wanted to show the film in a Republican drinking club in Belfast and brought Joe Comerford, cameraman, and myself up there. 

    The film also seemed to confuse that audience. A lady turned to us and asked: ‘What are yiz? Some kinda antellectuals?’ While we were there the club was raided by the British Army who moved silently and grimly through the crowd. 

    I found it strange that there was no heckling, not a voice raised in protest and deduced that, yes, there is something frightful happening in this part of Ireland.

    We were accommodated that night in the house of a man named Billy MacMillan whom I gathered had been shot by the rival Provisional IRA. In Ireland the first thing on the agenda is the split.

    I noticed a  man in the tiny back yard of the house carrying a revolver, presumably to protect us. It felt as if we were in a film. We were escorted to the eight-o’clock train the next morning by Eamon Smullen, the gentle man who had asked me to make the film.

    At no stage did I feel in danger. I think I must sleepwalk through life, incapable of  taking anything seriously, not even the darkness. All is at arm’s length. It still surprises me that

    Caoineadh Áirt Uí Laoire has become a kind of icon in the lexicon of Irish film making. In recent years it was exhibited for a month in Trinity’s Douglas Hyde Gallery. It was also featured in the Irish Museum of Modern Art as an example of the work of modern Irish artists.

    A couple of years ago it was restored and Joe Comerford and I showed it in Derrynane, the Kerry home of Daniel O’Connell’s family which features in the film. In the introduction I mentioned the film’s small budget.

    Poet Theo Dorgan was present and later in the pub said to me: ‘I know where that £6000 came from. I think I even know the post office from which it was stolen.’ I still hope he was joking.

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    Bob Quinn directed Poitín, the first feature film entirely in the Irish language, while his documentary works include the four-part Atlantean series tracing the origins of the Irish people. His recent memoir A Monk Manqué is being serialized in Cassandra Voices.

  • Last Days in RTÉ – ‘I came to kill you’

    In 1967, the fidgets struck again. That was the year my mother died, rapidly following my father.

    I confess now that I was not obviously upset by the deaths of my parents. In the culture of my generation and class, love, certainly any public expression of it, was an embarrassment. Such namby-pamby language was confined to the worship of film stars, sentimental songs, Jesus Christ and drink. This lack I often regret, having, in the area of emotional expression a limited palette.

    Affection, attachment, addiction, obsession, sentiment, desire, lust, liking, fondness – I am familiar with them all. But love itself is awkward territory, partly because the language of its expression is so inadequate, so debased that I have come to believe that, ‘whereof man cannot speak, let him be silent.’ Predictably, when I am confronted by the technicolour emotions of a funeral, however tragic, what usually comes to mind is a black and white war etching by Goya whose chilling caption is: ‘Shut up and bury your dead.’

    But this is merely a defence, a carapace adopted because I have a dread of being caught weeping, which weakness I am occasionally prone to, especially on occasions musical. Only an embarrassed few have ever been allowed to witness this, my Achilles heel.

    Besides, there is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, ‘Goldengrove’, in which a young girl, Margaret, grieves over the fall of Autumn leaves. Hopkins gently points out to her that as she ‘grows older she will come to sights colder’ and realise that it is actually her own demise she mourns. This applies to all funerals.

    I have no doubt that my parents – from their astral heights, of course – now understand the convolutions of my career. Including, for instance, why I declined to have my own children baptised in any faith, and why I have sung in both Catholic and Protestant choirs with no residue of belief in either of their dogmas – except as a useful social glue. I also admire the Semitic cultures of both Islam and Judaism and wish they would return to their pre-colonial mutual tolerance. My bets are therefore hedged. Music is my sole spiritual sustainer and default position on religion.

    What else could one expect from a flibbertigibbet?

    Decision Time

    Finally in 1967 I had had enough of the commercial dimension of television corrupting the concept of public broadcasting. Brilliant people in advertising were conspiring with TV managers, using reason to control the irrationalism of the masses and turn them into numbered consumers. But vestiges of common sense told me I needed to learn more about how the real world worked.

    A friendly philosopher, the late Jack Dowling, advised me to study Shakespeare. That was not drastic enough for me. I went to the RTÉ Programme Controller, said I had developed mental indigestion and was leaving television. That aesthetic man with a cigarette holder, the late Michael Garvey, said ‘stay brave’ and told me he would treat it as a sabbatical and pay my salary for three months. In retrospect it felt like compassionate leave. I got character references from people like Professor Ivor Browne and Mother Mary Nicholas and other sane people with whom I had made films. I then persuaded Tomás Roseingrave to get me into the University of Antigonish as an auditor in sociology. That’s when I really woke up.

    The philosopher, poet and ex-Jesuit Philip McShane once wrote to me: ‘Happy the man who preserves his illusions’. In Nova Scotia all of my more naïve illusions were demolished. I met Philip again, at a New Year’s party in Antigonish. Our pleasure at renewing acquaintance, expressed in the normal Irish epithets that hide affection e.g. ‘howiya, you old bollocks’, was overheard by our host, an old-fashioned Belfast Catholic immigrant. This stocky little man exploded, shouted that he would not tolerate ‘such fackin language in my house,’ and summarily evicted us into the snow and sub-zero temperature. We started walking, Philip forgetting his new young wife in the excitement. Loyally she followed in her car and saved us both from hypothermia.

    Through lectures in sociology, especially from Italian-American Vito Signorile,  I learned about the relativity of all cultural concepts, including religion, even knowledge itself. Vito was married to a feisty woman from Northern Ireland and he warned me about women: ‘When she has her period, she’s a monster.’  I learned that lesson too late.

    The last absolute I vainly clung to was a simplistic version of Marxism, even contradicting a young lecturer who derided that ideology as one which had never caught on. I sharply reminded him that Marx had not set a time limit for the self-destruction of Capitalism. That marvellous event did not happen for another forty years, in 2007, not too long after Socialism itself had self-destructed.

    Peace Outbreak

    My innocence of political reality also received a cold douche. To acquaint the Canadian students with their democratic system the youngsters were encouraged to imitate the national parties – Labour, Conservative and Liberal – by organising elections and establishing a mock parliament.

    We on the Left won in a coalition with the Liberals. On the first day of ‘Parliament’ we heard shots outside and a bunch of rifle-toting students on the defeated Conservative side burst into the formal Assembly. They were shouting that it was illegally constituted. Prudence suggested we leave  with dignity.

    One of the young gunmen, barring our way out, had his jaw broken by my closest friend there, Deets Kennedy, son of a tough Cape Breton miner. As I nursed a hangover on the following day I ruminated on life imitating art and thought hard about democracy. In case the vote didn’t work in your favour, you carried a blackthorn stick or a gun. What an effective system was democracy! At least in Ireland we merely forced the people to vote again and again until they got a referendum result right. I know what Deets Kennedy’s father would do in such a situation.

    I met Mr. Kennedy for the first and only time at a family wedding up in Sydney, Cape Breton. I felt honoured to be invited. On the way back from the formal nuptials Deets drove the car and entrusted his father to me, saying that no matter what happened I must keep his father beside me in the back seat. The earnestness of his request suggested to me that there were tribal tensions abroad.

    There had, of course, been drink taken. On the way, Mr. Kennedy behaved like a lamb, singing softly in my honour ‘Shall My soul pass through oul Ireland’ to the tune of Kevin Barry. The convoy stopped outside our party destination, Deets got out with a curt ‘You two stay there.’ Some altercation developed in front of the car. I leaned forward to try to identify the cause of the melee. When I turned to inquire of Mr. Kennedy as to the cause, he had vanished from my care. I soon recognised him on the footpath ahead, delivering a haymaker to one of the disputants.

    Deets later told me that the recipient was another son, always a troublemaker. Peace broke out and we had a wonderful party. I could only think: it is a devoted father who can identify and instantly defuse the one psychopath in the family, thus restoring equilibrium to the celebrations.

    I was a slow learner in every respect, trying to work things out rather than learn them by rote as I had once done with the penny catechism.

    Star-Gazer

    In December of that year I came home to assist in burying my mother and stayed for Christmas. At the wake in Hazelbrook Road, Terenure, I revealed to five grieving siblings and in-laws that each of the countless zillions of stars in the cosmos consisted of at least one departed human soul. It was, if not a metaphysical, then certainly a mathematical, possibility. Therefore our mother still existed. Despite my siblings’ reluctance  to accept this consolation, I persisted.

    I told them that no matter how simple and blameless a life such as our mother’s might seem, each human personality was so complex as to be beyond our ken and could not vanish into nothingness. The brain itself was a miracle of billions of electro-chemical processes. As it was largely unused during a person’s life, the reality of death must focus it wonderfully. In the final micro-second into which a life such as our mother’s was frantically compressed, there must be a surge of energy imaginable as no less than nuclear fusion. This process must transform the soul into an eternal incandescence. Simply put, the soul turns into a star.

    They should therefore not grieve for the dear departed but enjoy the astronomy.

    A tidy arrangement, I felt, having just read Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of the Noosphere.

    This Jesuit palaeontologist had daringly suggested that the human capacity for reflex thought must evolve into a girdle of consciousness enveloping the planet. He called it the Pleroma and his religious superiors were not happy about his invention. I now suspect that members of my extended family also took my soul-stirring ideas with a pinch of salt.  They guessed that my peroration was a front for grief.

    Thinking back, my speculation required no more a leap of faith than the incredible religion in which we were reared and which I abandoned long ago. In my ripe old age I still believe my invention to be as reliable an explanation of life’s ultimate mystery as anything Aquinas or Avicenna, Darwin or Hawkins or Dawkins, Ibn Sina or even De Chardin invented. And for a practical reason: human consciousness is a form of energy and as such, if we are to believe Einstein, cannot die or decay; it can only transform itself – exactly as water gaily does from liquid to ice to vapour. There can be no limit to the transformation of us bundles of energy.

    Around that time too, I ceremonially flung an old copy of the same penny catechism into a fire. Jack Dowling reminded me quietly that people who burned books were capable of burning people. That pulled me up short.

    In January 1968 I returned to Nova Scotia to complete my ‘studies’ and at term’s end to have a look around North America. For three months another friendly Dominican monk named Luke Dempsey and I drove around that mighty continent, staying buckshee in his Order’s monasteries.

    We called on Chicago, New Mexico, Death Valley, San Francisco, even visited Las Vegas for an overnight. The highlight of that was a breakfast where we perched at a bar and the waitress shimmied along behind it. Her walkway was so elevated that her magnificent thighs moved directly at our eye level. To notice Luke’s eyes modestly concentrating on his empty plate was a hilarious reminder of how fortunate I was not to have had a call to the religious life.

    When we finally came back to Nova Scotia I had a lovely reunion with a sensitive mother of two, named Zane whom I had met in Montreal months before. Skinny-dipping in the local river was delightfully involved. When I returned to Ireland I wrote a poem about our encounter which fortunately I have mislaid. It could never compete with Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’, astonishing love poems which I encountered at the back of the Catholic Sunday missal when I was an adolescent. They carried me through many a boring Mass service and subsequently came in useful in the business of wooing maidens.

    ”B e h o l d ,   t h o u   a r t   f a i r ,   m y   l o v e ;   b e h o l d ,   t h o u   a r t   f a i r ;   t h o u   h a s t   d o v e s ‘   e y e s   w i t h i n   t h y   l o c k s.

    T h y   l i p s   a r e   l i k e   a   t h r e a d   o f   s c a r l e t ,   a n d   t h y   s p e e c h   i s   c o m e l y :   t h y   t e m p l e s   a r e   l i k e   a   p i e c e   o f   a   p o m e g r a n a t e   w i t h i n   t h y   l o c k s .

    T h y   t w o   b r e a s t s   a r e   l i k e   t w o   y o u n g   r o e s   t h a t   a r e   t w i n s ,   w h i c h   f e e d   a m o n g   t h e   l i l i e s .”

    They may have been intended as paeans of praise to the Creator but I found them pleasantly erotic. My course was fixed.

    ‘Spitting blood’

    One night in 1968, having returned from Canada to resume my job in RTÉ, I saw darkness in the pale face of a man at the bar of Kiely’s pub near the RTÉ studios. I recognised him as Ed, the ex-husband of Zane. What was he doing in Ireland and especially in my neck of the woods? The old antennae of guilt immediately told me this was no coincidence, that there was something awry. My instinct was to clarify matters. I approached the bar and engaged him in as light a conversation as one can have with a brooding man. He was very pale, spoke in grim monosyllables and said he was staying in a nearby B&B. He told me he had hitched a lift from Montreal on a Canadian Air Force plane. I had never known he was a military man.

    Ignoring his clear hostility, I put on a show of welcome and resolved to keep him in my sights. I warmly insisted he come home for a drink in the house in which I was staying. After the short, wordless drive to mine host Dinno’s place, the latter – normally a sociable figure – excused himself and left the house. He told me later: ‘One look at that man’s face and I decided I wasn’t going to sleep under the same roof’.

    I didn’t sleep much that night, either.

    Next morning I boiled eggs for Ed and, as casually as possible, asked had he any particular schedule. ‘I came to kill you,’ he quietly said. So that was clear. I learned that he held me responsible for the break-up of his marriage. It was post-facto revenge because I had been given to understand by his wife that their marriage was long ended.

    ‘You really want to have a go at me?’ I asked. He nodded grimly. There was no getting away from it.  What could I say except: ‘I know the very place.’

    On the way to the wide open spaces of the Phoenix park he explained in detail that the Canadian Air Force had trained him in unarmed killing. He so worried me that I called in to my production assistant in the TV station, explained the situation and told her that, if I had not returned before lunch, she should send out a search party

    In a secluded spot in the Park we faced each other. By now I was more than nervous about his deadly skills. I had not had a fistfight since I played rugby but strict rules had governed that form of barbarism. Neither had the Marquis of Queensbury legislated for this circumstance. Ed ordered me ‘Take off your glasses.’ I reluctantly removed them, placed them carefully on my jacket and prepared for the worst. As I turned to meet my fate I was barely in time to dodge a sucker punch from Ed.  Fright made me go slightly berserk. I probably had the advantage in weight and after some minutes of my wild pummelling at him he held up his hands in submission.

    I drove him down to the nearest pub in Islandbridge where he vomited up the reviving brandy with which I plied him. As I deposited him at his B&B in Donnybrook I volunteered to meet him again that evening and show him the sights.

    He looked puzzled: this was no way to treat a sworn enemy. I pointed out that he was, after all, the son of Dublin emigrants to Canada but knew nothing of their city. The truth was, I felt sorry for him. When I later met him in the Scotch House on Burgh Quay he confessed to spitting blood since our altercation.

    I whisked him off to St. Vincent’s Hospital, then in Leeson St.,  where they decided to keep him overnight. He knew no-one in Dublin except myself, who dutifully called to the hospital the following day.  A nurse reported that Ed was suffering from kidney damage but had already signed himself out of the hospital, presumably to hitch an airlift back to Canada. I never heard from him again.

    Last year, in an email from his daughter – she found me on Facebook, where else?  – I learned that Ed’s curtains had recently been closed by cancer  and that our ancient encounter was now part of their family history.

    His daughter wanted the truth. I wrote a short hagiography of her father, stressing the honourable way he had tried to exact satisfaction from me. This was true. I had not realised that Ed was actually a mild-mannered dentist in the Air Force; he had probably never engaged in anything more violent than extracting a tooth. Apart from his pre-emptive, sabre-rattling about unarmed combat which had incited my overkill, the only other detail worth remembering is that, in Ed’s report of the encounter with me, he said ‘the old man was fitter than I thought.’ This ‘old man’ was thirty-three years of age at the time.

    Everything is relative.

    Resignation and Return

    ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind’, quoteth the tearful lady herself when she landed on my doorstep some weeks later. She and Ed  had physically fought for possession of their two young children in the mud of their farmyard. She had lost the grim struggle and got the next plane to Ireland. I had not the indelicacy to respond: ‘It never rains but it pours’. We spent a short while seeing the sights that Ed never had. She returned to Canada and married a sculptor.

    Not long afterwards I resigned from my permanent, pensionable post in RTÉ, bought an old Volkswagen and drove to Tehran and back with my first wife-to-be. That is quite another story. Alone on the return journey home at Christmas I developed a mild but uncomfortable form of tuberculosis called epididymitis which related to the testicles.

    It meant a short stay in hospital where, besides telling me I had various similar lesions on my lungs which had cured themselves, a specialist said I could never father a child. Recovering fast, but having spent all my pension contributions on the trip,  poverty forced me to crawl back and ask for contract work with RTE.

    Compassionate as ever, the organisation welcomed me and set me to the unexpected task of making a history series for children. I knew this new job was a prudent test of my boredom threshold but I persevered for four months. Then one day on a filming excursion to Belfast I had a discussion with Pat Kavanagh, the solid cameraman.

    It was 1969, one of the years when there was a questioning of all certainties.

    ‘Never trust anyone over thirty’ was one mantra. Another was ‘selling out to the system’. Yet another was: ‘If you’re going to commit suicide, take one with you.’

    Over a liquid lunch in Newry I stoutly maintained to Pat that there was a single unique point in every life when the decision to ‘sell out’ was made. Or not. He disagreed and perceptively said that capitulation to the system just crept up on a person gradually – usually accompanied by a mortgage. I agreed: we were mere puppets on strings. But it was time we looked up and noticed who was pulling the strings.

    I had no mortgage, nor any other responsibilities. I declared that here and now was one of those points of decision and ordered him and the crew to follow me to the West of Ireland. Reluctantly they followed because in those hierarchical times the crew accepted a producer/director as the unchallengeable boss. I would never get away with it now.

    I led the convoy all the way across Ireland to Roonagh pier in Mayo where we boarded the ferry for Clare Island. Then I wrote a letter for my female assistant to bring back to the station. Its intention was to exonerate the crew from any accusation of being willing accessories to my solo flight of fancy.

    A day later my immediate Head of Department, Maeve Piskorski, arrived on the island to persuade her prodigal protege to return to work. After twenty-four hours of pleasantly lubricated argument she departed without me, shaking her head in bewilderment. And that was the end of my RTE career and, I vowed, the end of my involvement with film and TV. I stayed on Clare Island for a couple of months, the guest and labourer of Michael Joe O’Malley, sheep farmer and philosopher.

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  • Culchies – An Excerpt from ‘A Monk Manqué’

    In the mid-1990s Seosamh O Cuaig and I were filming a programme for TG4 in the State of Minnesota. It concerned an 1880 shipload of emigrants from Conamara.

    In the city of St. Paul we were told that the term ‘Connemara’ was a century-old Minnesota synonym for lazy. This was curious, because nobody in the 19th century could survive on the rocky garrantaí of Conamara without hard, relentless physical work. There was no dole.

    We learned that the ‘Connemara’ slander originated in 1880 when a Catholic Bishop, John Ireland, publicly blamed his financial troubles on a group of fisher-families from this area. He had taken them from their rocky fields and canvas currachs in the West of Ireland, and settled the oldest and youngest members of the families, against their will, miles from the city on the vast prairies.

    They were instructed to become farmers. For the fit and young of the same families the bishop organized jobs in the city of St. Paul. Then came the worst winter in living history with temperatures thirty below.

    The plight of those raw prairie dwellers was so desperate that they became the subject of national debate in the American Press. The Bishop, responding to WASP criticism, said they were too lazy to work. His criticisms were widely reported.

    Naturally his urban flock and his separated brethren – the Freemasons of Morris County – did not doubt his word. But the Conamara immigrants, being neither literate or English speakers, could not defend themselves in that language, had no access to the print media.

    In Spring the Bishop relented, the ‘Connemaras’ were delivered back to the city of St. Paul – which was where they had thought they were going in the first place. They made a success of their lives, one of them eventually becoming mayor of the city.

    At least one Conamara family persevered on the prairie – that of Learaí Ó Flathartha – and also thrived.  Nevertheless the slander of ‘laziness’ had persisted to this day, mainly because the immigrants could not defend themselves in English.

    ‘But,’ as Seosamh O Cuaig grimly said to me during the course of making the film, ‘I can read and I can write, in English’ Therefore we intensified our researches and the film eventually showed how these people had been used as scapegoats for the failed ambitions of the colonizing Bishop, a Republican and an entrepeneur. Helped by a laicised Bishop Shannon we detailed his predecessor’s personal ownership of the railway land awarded to him for the purposes of Catholic settlement. It seemed clear that as time was running out on his contract, Bishop Ireland used these poor people simply to buy time and fulfil his undertakings to his friends in the Railway company.

    So fraught were his financial dealings that after he died his sister, a Mother Superior, destroyed all of the personal papers that related to the incident. But the mud stuck. Two Irish-American Minnesota lawyers happily told us, on film, that their Limerick-born father had emphasized to them: ‘Make sure people know you are from Limerick, not from Conamara.’

    ‘the cash crop’

    Nearly a century after the Minnesota mess, in 1973 in Conamara I had recorded a vox populi with youngsters attending the Irish Summer Colleges in Conamara. All townies, they unanimously dismissed the place as consisting of nothing but rocks, with no attractions whatsoever. The locals, according to a few, were lazy.

    How could they have made this judgment in three weeks? Presumably they had brought that bit of baggage with them from their suburban homes. Luckily, they know a little better now and there certainly is no local resentment to the Summer College industry.

    Business is business and the modern students are referred to locally by the affectionate term ‘the cash crop’. Nevertheless, from Marx with his term ‘rural idiocy’ to Garret Fitzgerald’s opposition to Knock Airport; from John D. Sheridan’s bucolic ‘Thomasheen James’ to stand-up comics today, there is something universal in this urban contempt for rural-dwelling ‘culchies’.

    The painter Michael FarrelI would jokingly ask sculptor Eddie Delaney and myself: ‘Are you two still rotting away in Connemara?’ The perception is based sometimes on ignorance, sometimes on fear of the wild men of the West.

    A film editor whom I brought to Conamara years ago confessed to me that his ventures beyond the Pale had hitherto never brought him further than Leixlip – fifteen miles from Dublin.

    Over the years, and quite separately, I remember two old friends of mine, a journalist and an actress, saying they felt threatened in the company of people in South Conamara. In forty years I have never felt thus threatened. My friends could not explain why they felt that way. I can only speculate on the reasons.

    Dancing at the Crossroads

    First, there may be resentment at the imposition of obligatory Irish on the monoglot English-speaking population of the island. This State policy was a Dublin invention but the resentment it engendered was directed at the imagined native speakers in their ghettoes in the West, as well as at soft targets like the writer Peig Sayers, and former Taoiseach (prime minister) and President Éamon de Valera, universally known as ‘Dev’.

    The latter’s quite admirable ambitions for human beings on this island were regularly ridiculed. Incidentally, what precisely is wrong with good-looking girls and athletic young men, small local industry, and the human activity of dancing which Dev advocated?

    Whatever his faults, Dev was way ahead of E. F Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful’ philosophy. The small linguistic communities of the Gaeltachtaí may in the past have been a material source of resentment in that the grants the natives received were positively discriminatory and favoured Irish-speaking households. But they did not get electricity until 1956!

    The pure and simple truth of the resentment, according to research by Mairtin O Catháin, published in the Galway Advertiser, is, as Wilde said, rarely pure and never simple. O Catháin showed that substantial Gaeltacht grants – not the petty ones based on linguistic facility but the serious ones for business and enterprise –  actually benefit more the fictional ‘gaeltacht’ residents of booming suburbs such as Bearna, Moycullen, Knocknacarra and Claregalway than the actual Irish-speaking families in small villages like Cill Chiarån or Carna.

    Garnering votes from such dense English-speaking suburbs once guaranteed Fianna Fáil success in elections to such quangos as the Board of Udarås na Gaeltachta. Indeed one of that party’s proud successes was a man from Claregalway who could speak no Irish whatsoever!

    This is the pragmatic reason why the outrageously fictional extension of ‘the gaeltacht’, invented by Fine Gael’s Patrick Lindsay more than fifty years ago, could be maintained by Fianna Fáil’s clever directors of elections. The result is that the only community for which Irish is the first language gets a minimum of the kudos and all of the brickbats for speaking Irish.

    The above Mr. Lindsay actually spent his retirement as my neighbour in Conamara. He once said publicly and in my presence that he was attracted to the place by its ‘touch of savagery.’ Despite his unconscious racism, the locals drank happily with him in Tí Michael Jack’s pub.

    One can be sure that the modern version of W.B.Yeats’s freckled fisherman in Connemara cloth going to a place ‘where stone is dark under froth’ is no Irish speaker at all. He probably has a pad in Ballyconneely, Connemara where three-quarters of the houses belong to weekend visitors from Dublin and environs.

    Then there is the neo-liberal urbanite’s association of the Irish language and rural life with poverty and idiocy. There is the canard that, as in the nineteenth century, incest flourished because the roads were bad and that this resulted in a population of malformed retards.

    But a medical doctor’s RHA survey of Leitir Mealláin in 1891 – which I possess –  described this community as the healthiest and handsomest he had ever seen. The endless parade of bright and beautiful young native speakers on TG4 for more than the past decade should by now have given the lie to that perception.

    ‘Going to the Source’

    But a lie that’s big enough – as Goebbels proved – becomes the conventional wisdom. Years ago I attended a Temple Bar debate in Dublin where Dr. Terence Browne of Trinity College and Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times locked horns. In the course of it Terence Browne referred to Irish as a dead language. Fintan did not disagree.

    I had just driven up from my Béal an Daingin post office, where the staff and customers all joked and did their business in Irish. I mentioned this as evidence that the rumours of the demise of Irish might be exaggerated, and asked Terence how he could support his impression. His dismissive answer was couched in analogies to ‘dead’ Latin.

    I concluded this was not personally researched, and a second hand opinion derived from the conventional East coast urban wisdom, i.e. that Irish was a suspect badge of the unholy trinity of nationalism, Catholicism and Provo-ism.  I did not have the nerve to remind this fine scholar to take his own academic advice and ‘go to the source’, before dismissing the language.

    The source of my own experience is over forty years living and working in the only bilingual community in Ireland, whose tradition is neither narrow nor insular: it knows Boston better than Enda Kenny, and all the main cities of England better than Bertie Ahern – in other words, Conamara is made up of men and women of the world.

    Long before Sir Anthony O’ Reilly said Ireland was a great place to tog out in, but that the real game was ‘elsewhere’, the people of Conamara and rural Ireland in general were forced to explore that ‘elsewhere’. And it was not to play the gentleman’s game of rugby, but to survive their abandonment by the entrepreneurial class from whom O’Reilly sprang.

    In the time I have lived in Conamara most of my work has been devoted to countering this subconscious racism, trying to persuade Irish urbanites – including its professional gaeilgeoirs – that my rural neighbours are not lazy thugs, but the hardest-working people I ever encountered; not ‘thick’, but the most coherent and smart, bilingual community in this island.

    At a practical level, every family in Conamara could build their own house and make any repairs necessary, grow their own food, build a boat, excavate their own fuel, subtly negotiate the traps of central bureaucracy, and be on first name terms with their local and national public representatives. Such skills are pretty thin on the ground in suburbia and, when global warming intensifies, my neighbours are the kind of people from whom I will certainly be seeking survival advice.

    Reference Group Theory

    Years ago in Canada I learned the principle of reference group theory. It is better known as the pecking order, establishing who we are in relation to the echelons above and below us. Thus, Toronto English speakers look down on the French of Quebec. They both look down on the Scots of Nova Scotia who in turn look down on the Irish of Newfoundland or ‘Newfies’.

    In the US the WASPS looked down on the Irish Catholics, who looked down on the Italian Catholics. And everybody agreed that all a Polack fish was competent to do was drown. At the bottom of the heap were the Blacks and then the aboriginal native Americans.

    It was social benchmarking, each group maintaining its pecking order. Conamara is not entirely free of this. I have heard a man from An Spidéal expressing doubts about the degree of civilization of people twenty miles west of him.

    Reference group theory is not just financially and socially alive in a class-ridden society such as ours. It has deep roots in our insecurities. It emerged in Kerryman jokes, yummy mummies and SUVs, the DART accent, Ross O’Carroll Kelly and especially the terms ‘culchies’ and ‘knackers’ It is accepted as part of the natural order.

    But we are essentially social animals and have depended for our evolutionary survival not on our individual natures being red in tooth and claw, but on the social behaviour called cooperation which is designed to keep the more ugly parts of our nature under control.

    No bypasses or rat-runs

    It is a poor reflection of Western civilization that, before and since Hiroshima, the animal species most actively practising cooperation is the ant. The ruthless competitor, the profiteer at all cost, those CEOs who show a paper profit by getting rid of as many employees as possible are still our heroes, no matter how often they have revealed their feet of clay.

    Is this an argument against Market values and modern Progress? Yes, if progress and the oil that lubricates the so-called free market and our modern lifestyle mean the death of community and consequent lack of empathy with our neighbour, quite apart from the distant deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, together with the destroyed lives of 30,000 decent young Americans. Not to mention the imminent decay of our planet.

    Is there any point anymore in pleading for non-consumptive lifestyles – not to mention understanding, tolerance, respect, love your neighbour, kiss a Traveller for Christ?  Did the warnings of Mountjoy prison ex-Governor John Lonergan, or homeless children’s protector Fr. Peter McVerry have any effect?

    Did Bono and Geldof and all the NGOs make us deaf to the fact that Charity begins at home? The corporations and advertisers who make so much money from our insecurities, fears and petty snobberies have set us on a material and metaphysical road which has no bypasses or rat-runs or backwaters.

    There may be no escape from our unsustainable lifestyles and topsy-turvy values until the sea levels rise, oil runs out, the tankers grind to a stop and clean water is $100 a barrel. It will end in tears. Perhaps sooner than we think. But I am an optimist. That’s why I long ago embraced the rural life, planted trees for my six children and ten grandchildren and cut wood for my stove.

    I believe that despite all the spin-doctoring, truth will out, that we are all now aware of our responsibilities, all travellers on the road to God-knows-where, tourists in the departure lounge, mice sailing on a ship of cheese. But I’m also realistic enough to remember Dorothy Parker’s words:

    ‘O life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea / And love is a thing that can never go wrong / And I’m Queen Marie of Romania.’

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    Featured Image is of Dara Beag O Fatharta.

  • Waiting for Colonel Ghaddafi

    I was pretty sure I was going to die, sooner rather than later, one midsummer’s night in Libya’s desert. It was 1988. A cousin of Colonel Ghaddafi, a military man, was driving us to meet the Great Man himself. In the darkness, we had turned left off the tarmacadamed main road between Benghazi and Tripoli, and were bumping over scrub and dunes on an invisible track, when the realisation dawned on me.

    The convivial chat amongst my companions – an Irishman, an Englishman and my Arab interpreter – dried up, and silence filled the jeep. Suddenly it was quite clear: we were being brought out here to be shot.

    I knew  the Englishman had lied about his Public School background. Had Ghaddafi found this out and deduced he was a spy for the Brits? This was around the period Libya was supplying arms to the IRA.

    I was mixing in strange company, but my excuse was scholarship: my work on the Irish/North African connection had brought me to the regime’s attention as a person sympathetic to Islam, and who might also be sympathetic to Libya and its Leader.

    My interpreter told me that twelve months previously he had turned down an offer to become Minister for Information: ‘You don’t say No to this man, but how could I work for the regime, having seen friends hung in the public square?’

    He too had good reason to be nervous. He was the one who introduced me to the concept: ‘Bone in My Meal’ – meaning  there’s a fly in the ointment or, life is great except for one tiny thing.

    We two Irishmen could not think of any reason why they should try to get rid of us, except as awkward witnesses. On the other hand, maybe we had corrupted his aides by persuading them to smuggle our hard liquor into this strictly dry country. Worse, I had allowed one of them to polish off half my vodka (he explained that vodka didn’t leave a smell on his breath). Were they suspicious because I wrote my daily notes in the Irish language, and their regular surveillance of my room frustratingly divulged nothing?

    One morning, after crying off on an excursion, I answered a knock on the door to find three burly and embarrassed men. They carried one towel between them and pretended that was the purpose of their visit. They entered, installed the towel, and departed sheepishly.

    Perhaps I had not shown sufficient enthusiasm in the discussions about writing the Leader’s biography. Yes, it’s true. This was an exploratory visit. In preparation I had read most of the existing accounts of the man. The indigenous works were grossly sycophantic, the foreign ones mostly antagonistic, many written in British tabloid style.

    Apart from a few objective demographic and economic descriptions of the country, I found only one account, Ghadaffi’s Libya, by Jonathan Bearman, with a preface by Claudia Wright, which struck me as fair-minded.

    Perhaps I had insulted the Great Man at our first meeting when I spoke in Irish, leaving him and the interpreters upstaged until I translated my own words? I knew I was privileged. Five years earlier Kenneth Clarke, a Minister for Health representing the Thatcher Government, had hoped to meet Ghaddafi but was fobbed off with functionaries. My guides said the access granted to me was unparalleled in their experience. But I already knew flattery as the lingua franca of North Africa.

    There again, it might have been my direct question: ‘How, sir, with the absolute power at your disposal, have you not become corrupt?’ Could the interpreter have translated that as an accusation?. No, not likely, because Ghaddafi replied: ‘But I do not have absolute power. The People have it.’

    Hence the nervous silence as the jeep groaned and bucked all over the place. The military man seemed unsure of his path: he constantly peered around into the blackness, and occasionally up into the dark sky. I followed his glances into the dark and thought: ‘Yes, this would be a handy spot to lose four bodies.’ I had already seen the Kalashnikov resting handily on the floor beside him.

    The driver suddenly jammed on the brakes. ‘This is it’, I thought. But all he did was get on the radio, and apparently ask for directions.

    We resumed our helter skelter ride, and an hour later saw lights across the scrub. A circle of car headlamps greeted us. Should we be relieved, or was this to be some kind of show trial and execution?

    At the far side of the circle stood a figure straight out of Sigmund Romberg’s 1926 Broadway Musical ‘Desert Song’: a tall sheikh in flowing robes.

    I have to confess that my first ever ‘encounter ‘ with North Africans was in a musical comedy in which I sang and acted in 1961, and in which I was described by the music critic of the Irish Times, the late Charles Acton, as ‘the only unconvincing character on stage’; a comment which fortuitously  saved me from making a greater fool of myself in the theatre for the rest of my life. This did not, of course, prevent me from exposing my inadequacies in other areas.

    A quarter of a century later Acton penned an enthusiastic endorsement of my Atlantean speculations, saying he was entirely convinced of an Irish-Bedouin musical connection. We never met.

    The real Sheikh who now faced me was Ghaddafi. I realised this was his answer to my question about avoidance of corruption: the implication was that he was at heart a Bedouin, a man of the desert. The utter cleanliness of the desert kept man pure.

    He answered my first question – about Bedouin incorruptibility – by handing me a jackrabbit and a pigeon which, to judge by their warmth and the tiny pulse I could still feel in the rabbit, were only recently sacrificed. These gifts did not reassure me.

    I thought I might as well get a photograph and sought his permission. He gestured to his Bedouin costume and half-grinned: ‘If they see me dressed like this they will certainly say I am a terrorist.’

    A rug was spread on which we sat, in front of a small fire. Our host lowered himself onto a stool, deftly slipped into place by an armed female bodyguard, one of his so-called ‘revolutionary nuns.’ He did not even glance behind him. ‘Now that’, I thought, ‘is the confidence of power’. She also draped a cloak around his shoulders and made sure we kept a respectful distance. Then, of all things, he poured us each a cup of tea.

    In an effort to avoid staring, I ventured that in his youth in the desert he must have often drunk tea round a fire like this. ‘No’, he said. ‘We did not have the luxury of tea in those days.’

    That put me in my privileged Western place. Conversation with this man had not been easy. Perhaps he just wanted to be stared at.

    Then I had an inspiration: I remembered that the feast of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac was imminent. It had seemed to me that Ghaddafi’s father was sparsely mentioned in accounts of his life – even though the father lived to the age of ninety-five – whereas the Leader’s mother was very prominent in despatches. ‘Ah-ha’, thought I, ‘maybe there’s something Oedipal in the background’.

    ‘I wonder’, I said, ‘about Abraham and Isaac and your relationship with your own father’.

    ‘I share your wondering’, he said and refilled my cup.

    No more questions for the moment, your honour.

    The Englishman referred to an alleged whipping episode of Arab boys by the Brits in Egypt. He asked whether this had fuelled the Leader’s anger.

    ‘Not especially’, he replied, ‘I saw all of humanity being whipped, I saw cruelty towards humanity everywhere.’

    I realised this man should have been a film director. He did in fact finance the epic ‘Lion of the Desert’, at a time when oil revenue was unparalleled. His four months of army training in England were largely spent at Beaconsfield – now the location of the National Film School. The elaborate scenario he had set up for us was a masterpiece of wide-screen cinema. Only the dialogue needed a little polishing. We were flattered at the show put on for us but, needless to say, were, quite literally,  a captive audience out there in the desert.

    There was a certain amount of polite conversation which did not last long. My fellow Irishman made a reference to Samuel Becket, quoting the phrase ‘Imagination dead Imagine’, which resulted in blank looks all round. I’m still not quite sure what his point was.

    I enquired, fairly disingenuously, whether Mr. Ghaddafi saw himself as a kind of philosopher king in the Socratic mould. I forget the answer, if he gave one at all. The conversation was desultory. What must he have thought of these idiot Irishmen who spoke of literature and philosophy as if they were keys to understanding life’s great mysteries?

    In a practical tone, Ghaddafi referred to a letter he had written to Kurt Waldheim about Bobby Sands and the Hunger Strikers. I mentioned the book Ten Men Dead by David Beresford and Peter Maas, and he asked me to send him a copy. I never sent it.

    After perhaps a half-hour he stood up. The conversation petered out. Our minds, I suspect, were running on parallel tracks miles apart, and consequently doomed never to meet. He seemed to be satisfied he had made his general point: that the ascetic life of a desert Bedouin was the ideal on which to base one’s life and society. Mind you, the fancy suit, possibly Armani, that peeped out from under his desert robes slightly undermined the homily.

    A large dormobile drove up. The Leader rose, shook hands, vanished into its interior and off it trundled into the blackness. Our guide explained that the Leader suffered from some arthritic condition; hence the dormobile. I was assured that I would have at least sixteen – a figure plucked out of the air –  meetings with the man, and that if the biography was successful I would be commissioned to make a film of his life with an unlimited budget. With these dreams of grandeur we were left to face the uncomfortable ride home across the scrubland. At least we were still alive.

    It wasn’t the end.

    On the way back a couple of jackrabbits were trapped in the corridor of our headlights. Our driver  stopped the jeep suddenly, grabbed his rifle and leaped from the vehicle. Laughing, he began blasting away at the terrified animals. It was as if he was relieving the tension of the past few hours.  He missed. I got out to stretch my legs and he offered me the rifle. I declined, much to his surprise.

    We slept uncertainly that night wondering what other scenarios Mr. Ghaddafi had in store for us.

    ********

    Some months later in the Crane Bar in Galway I met five American students bound for London to catch a PanAm flight back to New York, and their University in Syracuse. I admit this may be hindsight, but even in the presence of my lively two-year-old, they seemed unusually subdued for young people. I don’t believe in premonitions. Maybe they were just worn out with travel.

    A couple of days later I heard about the horror of the plane crash in Lockerbie, Scotland. The news bulletin said many of the passenger were students from Syracuse University in New York. When it emerged that a bomb was the cause, the finger was pointed at Libya.

    I did not refer publicly to my encounters with Ghaddafi until much later. I feared my musings might endanger the people who confided in me there –  despite their urgings at the time to tell the world. I hope it is safe for them now if I mention in passing that one of them brought me to a beach in Cyrenaica and said: ‘When you go home, tell the Americans that this is the easiest place to invade.’ Not far away was a place called Tobruk, which even I had heard of.

    Interesting things happen to me in North Africa.

    All images (c) Bob Quinn.

  • Early Days in RTÉ

    Back in Dublin again, I was one of thirty, all-male trainees destined to become the camera, lighting and sound operators with the new television service.  I started late, in November 1961 and found the first work ambience I had ever enjoyed. We were based in the hall of a school near Ringsend and then in a warehouse on Lower Middle Abbey Street, where we pre-recorded dramas and musical programmes for broadcast when the station would go on air.

    So began a love/hate relationship with RTÉ which, though I have been a free spirit since 1969, has endured to the present day. My early attempts to become a writer, lover, lieder singer, piano player, actor, writer, travel agent all faded away like the morning dew, sublimated into this exciting new medium. My flibbertigibbet nature – as my father described it – had paid off. He had also described it as ‘divine discontent’, which I quite liked.

    As I write, the TV station and I are sharing over a half-century of uneasy co-existence.

    I spent the first two years as a sound operator, a job whose initial glamour soon wore off. Kevin McClory, producer of the early James Bond movies, once told me that it was as a lowly microphone boom operator he first learned how to produce films. He had regularly and stealthily let his boom microphone linger above the producers’ conversations.  He learned their Machiavellian ways by eavesdropping.

    However, for me, RTÉ was far from James Bond and after two years the old demon of boredom raised its fickle head. How much longer could I endure days of cable-bashing, boom-swinging, disc-playing, the only functions for which I was qualified, having no technical insight into the mysteries of sound?

    Frustration was not alleviated by my occasional writing, which included devising and presenting a couple of radio programmes. Only concern at my parents’ likely final disillusionment postponed my certain departure.

    In the new year of 1962 we moved into Montrose, the Michael Scott-designed television studios in Donnybrook. The place was soon named ‘fairyhouse’ after the alleged number of homosexuals employed. The term ‘gay’ had not yet been appropriated by that lobby. I could identify only a very few, among them Hilton Edwards, Head of Drama  and Alpho O’Reilly, Head of Design. Alpho made no secret of his revulsion at the first appearance of finely-contoured mini-skirts in the canteen and corridors. I am still acquainted with the two first, magnificently-thighed girls who bravely wore them. Alpho disappeared one day and neither he nor his car were ever found.

    There was also a popular young floor manager named J. whose wit was legendary. Once he was unlucky enough to hire a taxi driver who was openly ‘homophobic’ – years before that word was coined for queer-basher. It was a rainy night and J. caused the driver to search endlessly for an address. Finally when the destination was found and J. alighted, he left his umbrella on the back seat. The driver thrust it at him with the farewell: ‘Hey Fairy! Don’t forget your wand.’

    Jeremy clutched his property, pointed it at the driver and said: ‘Turn to shite.’

    The rest of us were boringly straight. But we had fun. Our coming-of age-occasion was when we dared have a drinking party on Good Friday when all pubs were closed. It was the initiative of Tom Mack, a fellow worker in the sound department who regaled us with tales of his enviable, and probably imaginary, sex life. Reality caught up with Tom: he was dismissed for sexually harassing a make up girl in a dressing room.

    James Plunkett once described the RTÉ organisation to me as ‘compassionate’. He was referring to the organisation’s capacity for forgiving those who succumbed to alcoholism and other social diseases. But Tom Mack’s crime was sexual, which was beyond the pale. It was officially described in Civil Service terms as ‘moral turpitude’, and he ran away to England with the wife of the Head of Graphics. For an inhibited colleague like me, what was there not to admire about him? I was bored and desperate.

    Out of the blue the cavalry came to my rescue. RTÉ management offered me simultaneously a choice of three jobs: production assistant for commercial radio programmes (which, with the hindsight of my detestation of consumerism, is ironic); trainee newsreader was the second offer – Mike Murphy was a fellow trainee. This was the initial path trod by most of the first batch of Irish TV personalities: Bart Bastable, Gay Byrne, Andy O’Mahony, Frank Hall, Bunny Carr, Terry Wogan et alia.  I now murmur ‘Whew!’ at the narrow escape I had from the delusions of minor celebrity. But, as Kurt Vonnegut put it to me: ‘I could sure do with the money’.

    The third offer was everyone’s dream job at the time: TV producer. It did not take any heart-searching to choose it. Looking back on my various jobs, I wonder how employers were blind to my chronic unemployability. Perhaps all they saw was malleable innocence and may have mistaken it for humility. If you can fake that you can fake anything.

    I spent five busy years as a producer/director, working with some of the above talented people in programmes which included the original Late Late Show. But mainly I made documentary films, which enabled me to escape the straitjacket of a studio

    In our youth in the Coffee Inn in Duke St. the late Nuala Ó Faoláin said to me: ‘You have unresolved adolescent complexes’. I had unwisely revealed my private thoughts to a journalist – worse, to a sophisticate. Twenty years later in West Virginia I met Nuala and happily told her I still had the same complexes, but now found them a useful spur to creativity. ‘Lucky you’ she said.

    As I had recently produced a fictional memoir, Smokey Hollow, she asked my advice about doing the same. I could offer nothing except the jaded: apply thy bottom to a chair and start writing. Not long afterwards she began her acclaimed autobiography Are You Somebody? We had each learned that personal versions are the only antidote to objective reality. However, I was taken aback by her portrait of her father, bon viveur journalist Terry O’Sullivan, as the villain of her upbringing. He, a music lover, had once rung me in studio after a music programme which I had devised for Radio Eireann and wistfully said: ‘I wish I’d made that.’ I never met the man in person but it softened the feminist version of him later portrayed in Nuala’s book.

    Ironically, Father Romould Dodd – another Dominican – head of Religious Programmes asked the powers-that-be in RTÉ that I, sceptic, agnostic, non-believer, take your pick, be appointed to his non-existent department. Thereafter, I could make films on any subject I liked. I would merely decide on a theme, meet Romould over his gin and tonic in the RTÉ social club, and tell him what I had in mind. He would nod approval, smile affably and regale me with tales of his time as a chaplain in the oilfields of the Middle East.

    My illusions stayed with me when I was making documentary films. Early efforts concentrated on the old-fashioned truth that we are each a fallible link in a social chain made strong by cooperation i.e. we are completely interdependent. I even titled a film on the Cheshire Homes ‘The Weakest Link’ to argue that the apparently handicapped are just differently endowed and that the apparently healthy are just as handicapped, certainly less than perfect.

    My penchant for fantasy was soon recognised by the new Head of Drama who invited me to join his department. I declined and told him about Robert O’Flaherty, maker of ‘Man of Aran’ and ‘Nanook of the North’, who had invited a friend to join him in documenting the lives of exotic and primitive peoples. The friend, John Grierson, replied that his personal preference was to document the lives of the savages in Birmingham. Grierson went on to found the National Film Board of Canada and become another hero of mine.

    Meanwhile, I was finding out that my childhood version of Christianity was an imposter, a pretender. I had been led up the garden path. Fundamental Christianity and Socialism, though apparently deadly enemies, were actually the same thing and neither were being practised! Quite unconsciously I fell for the worst of both worlds and became that contradiction in terms, a Catholic Marxist, just like Arthur Dooley, the Liverpool sculptor. Dooley had  shown my colleague Jim Fitzgerald and myself his absurdist two-story miniature Model T Ford which he had called after the Tory bigwig, The Sir Alec Douglas Hume. Because, Arthur explained, ‘it doesn’t work either’. Fitzgerald kept the sculpture until poverty forced him to sell it to Charles J. Haughey.

    These vague ideas I tried desperately to reconcile, despite two realisations that blunted my idealism. The first was watching my films as they were broadcast under the RTÉ religious ‘Horizon’ banner every Sunday at teatime. The family would briefly glance at the screen (“Oh, another of yours’) and resume eating. The second was Catholic-induced guilt: I was a whited sepulchre. How could I preach social virtues to others when I myself was a confused hotbed of lust and decadence? How else explain being locked up with a cageful of prostitutes in a Parisian gendarmerie in 1966? Here is my version:

    On the RTÉ rugby football team actor Frank Kelly (aka ‘Father Jack’) and myself were the centre three-quarters who outdid each other in physical unfitness. The team travelled to Paris to play the RTF (French TV) team and see the Irish/French international. Our ruthless opponents forced cognac on us and kept us up until 4.00 am. At 9.00 am we staggered onto the rugby pitch, were soundly thrashed and that afternoon saw the Irish team suffer the same fate. There was then another sorrow-drowning dinner with a cognac-scoffing competition and a French tie-snipping ceremony – presumably a symbol of our rugby castration that morning – which led to mild violence.

    That night we attended a discotheque whose air I found suffocating. I climbed on to a window sill on the 2nd floor to get a breath of the balmy Paris night air and a little peace. It appears that some overwrought dancer then looked up, spotted my legs dangling overhead, screamed and gave everybody the impression that there was a suicide in the offing. Soon a group of uniformed men arrived to talk me down. I explained my breathing difficulties to the Gendarmes but they missed the point and insisted I come along with them. I did so, protesting mildly about free will and democracy.

    That is how I ended up in a cage in the police station, being fed cups of black coffee and sharing mimed jokes with some ladies of the night who had also been rounded up. One of my team mates with a smattering of French finally persuaded the Gendarmes that I was not a serious threat to public order or myself, and they released me.

    I continued my television campaign for illusory decencies until 1967 when the effort proved too much. My labours had produced no change in the world, certainly none apparent to me; the majority of people were as sensibly pragmatic as they’d ever been. Most were – to this arrogant observer – living unexamined lives, concentrating their energies on careers, ignoring my filmic exhortations to observe the lilies in the fields.

    Literature gave me intimations that everybody lived unadmitted lives of quiet desperation. I remember devouring, on successive lunch hours in Kiely’s pub in Donnybrook, two books that were mind altering: R.D. Laing’s Politics of Experience and Peter L. Berger’s The Precarious Vision. I would defy any impressionable person of the time to read those books and carry on their normal humdrum lives. They certainly changed mine because I had not been defused by third level education, and was that homemade time-bomb, an autodidact. The first book questioned our definition of ‘normality’; the second demonstrated the relativity of all belief systems. They incited me to question the very ground on which I walked, and established a lifelong pattern of querying every fixed position.

    I also got an insight from the late writer Francis Stuart.

    In the Arts Club in Dublin I asked him whether he resented the likes of Frederick Forsyth making a fortune from reactionary potboilers while he had to soldier on modestly. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I see myself as a backroom researcher. My findings will gradually filter down.’ This demonstrated to me his modesty as well as faith, hope and confidence, attributes to which I hopelessly aspired.

    Stuart defined for me the only unique perspective a person possesses, the one that alone distinguishes him or her from their fellows: his ignorance. That cheered me up. Not possessing much talent but plenty of ignorance, it became my lifejacket. In his advice Stuart was echoing T.S. Eliot’s dictum: ‘what we know is what we do not know’, and  ‘the only wisdom is humility’.

    I became confident in my ignorance, enough to stop trying to conceal it, actually revelling in it. As a direct consequence a producer colleague once rhetorically asked whether I was very humble or very stupid. I answered that I was very stupid, which reply the arrogant wretch was forced to concede as quite clever, covering both bases. It even saved him a bloody nose. I discovered that an admission of ignorance on my part invited confidences from others. This proved invaluable in the making of documentary films.

    I did not pause to assess the truth of Stuart’s or Eliot’s wisdom; I was too busy picking theirs and everybody else’s brains for answers. I thought Stuart’s was a good philosophy for a writer who sensed the abyss. It was not inconsistent with his youthful throwing in his lot with the Nazis, for which many would never accept his artistic excuses. Although I found his autobiographical Black List Section H to be a little self-serving, designed to de-nazify his reputation, its frankness was startling and his novels were thought-provoking. Francis Stuart was a devout, perhaps even a mystic Christian, who enjoyed a very long life and whose funeral I attended in County Clare.

    The challenge of ‘that which we do not know’ is for me balanced by the insight that we are all in the same gluepot, just guessing, studying form. The exceptions are those – among them career academics, high priests and politicians – whose busy eyes and mouths are full of certain certainties. I could add much more on this subject, having spent the second half of my life trying to rid myself of what I learned in the first half.

    I think I have by now earned an honorary PhD in ignorance.

    In the sense that a doctor ‘practises’ medicine, never mastering it, I practised the art/craft of film for many years. Now I realise I was merely treading water, blundering around and, unlike doctors, unable to bury my mistakes: twenty of my films were recently re-run on Irish national television With few exceptions, they resigned me to the futility of any attempt at excavating truth or changing the world by one tiny iota. Rather late have I discovered that all change begins with oneself.

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  • Making Films

    I’ve just made my last film, a short called Bog Graffiti. Another last film.

    I always make that resolution when a film is put to bed. Never again, I say, will I go through the pain.

    In my childhood the cinema was already a fantasy, one which we could only occasionally afford.

    When as day trippers we went on excursions to Bray, one of the novelties was a machine with a handle. If you inserted a penny – a large investment – you could wind the handle and view a jerky series of photos which constituted a thirty-second epic of what the butler saw. The technique was analogous to that of Edison fifty years before, when he filmed a five-second sneeze.

    Though moving images are what have been laughingly called my livelihood for too long, the medium was never my first love. I merely stumbled into it, an accidental activity that seemed to fit me like a glove, rather like a loyal and unappreciated wife.

    I am no longer considered by apparatchiks to possess the puff to make another, but I can still enjoy the rare film of excellence made by somebody else and, if provoked, become long-winded about the process of becoming a film maker.

    There are two accepted routes. The first is the apprenticeship method: you watch and listen to other people doing it. The second is through formal media courses which produce experts rather than film makers. Neither of these processes has much to do with actually making a film – it largely depends on not being very good at anything else. The same principle applies to most art forms: they are not a matter of loving or wanting, but about desperation. You either have to do it or you do not. I needed it, or at least something like it. Film would do for what is referred to ‘as the time being’ – a period which in my case extended to a half-century.

    My first short film took as its theme Eliot’s, ‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock’. It featured a middle-aged actor paddling in the sea, listening for the mermaids while his withered wife lay on Killiney beach, settling the pillows by her head and murmuring about Michelangelo. At least that was what I hoped to imply. Surefire box-office. Six of us RTE trainees had spent a few months listening to two Danish film experts. First they showed high-class documentaries. Secondly they loaned each of us a 16mm camera for a day. I went into the city and filmed shadows. I was hooked: it wasn’t like work at all.

    My early attempts have been lost in the bowels of RTÉ. In those early days, the concept of posterity did not exist. Nobody was going to die. Until Seán Ó Riada did, aged forty.

    It is not easy, in this impenetrably complex era of digital reality, to re-imagine what film-making once involved. Principally, film was a chemical, rather than the electronic process which now dominates the activity. The former meant controlling a light source (usually daylight) so that it would disturb the silver nitrate particles on sensitised celluloid in such a precise fashion as to produce a desired image.

    Whether it was 16mm gauge film, which was the TV standard in those days, or 35mm which was the cinema standard, there were twenty-four of those images exposed per second. In between, each of those images was a fraction of a second of black whose quickness of passing deceived the eye so that it was not noticed.

    Next, the same celluloid had to be treated in chemical baths to remove the silver and reveal the negative images. It was rumoured that film laboratories in England made more profit from the recycling of silver than from the processing fees they charged.

    The late and much-travelled Barney McKenna, banjo player in The Dubliners, once confided to me his advanced ideas on the subject. He said that the Rhine was so polluted with chemicals flowing down from Switzerland that the film industry didn’t need laboratories. German film makers simply dipped their films in the chemical stream. That’s how Germans could make films cheaper, Barney said.

    At our basic level the director and cameraman had to work without a picture monitor. Using the tiny camera viewfinder and a light meter, the framing and exposure of the picture had to be imagined beforehand. The resultant images could not properly be seen until they were processed and returned from the London laboratory as ‘rushes’.

    Nowadays there are LCD viewfinders on video cameras, which allow you to see precisely what the lens is producing. If you still don’t know what you are doing or can’t make up your mind, that is no obstacle. Videotape, mini-cards and something called cloud technology now mean that you can cover your vacillations by shooting endless hours and unlimited ‘takes’ of the same scene. You can rely on the editor to spend hours and days selecting the most appropriate shots from the chaos. That is why film editors develop a nice line in profanity and why post-production costs escalate.

    Previously the director had to describe the shot and movement he wanted. The cameraman had to interpret this wishful thinking and, sighing, mark the lens barrel with slivers of white camera tape to remember his different points of focus. Nothing was automatic. He had to meter the available light and adjust the lens accordingly. All these matters had to be addressed after the important creative decisions were made: what was the purpose of the shot, what should the actors say and do, how much film stock and daylight are left, how can the sound man pick up dialogue without revealing the microphone but, principally, what time is coffee break?

    The process was tangible, especially the editing which was done by physically manhandling the film on a Steenbeck machine and winding the magnetic soundtrack backward and forward to acquire synchronisation of sound. The latter required, at the beginning or end of each take, a distinct noise in precise coordination with an image of that sound’s source. This requirement was usually met with the clapperboard. Sometimes you just clapped your hands in front of the lens.

    It was not just a rumour that the late Fr Joe Dunne, intrepid Radharc oneman film crew, solved this problem in non-unionised foreign parts with his shoe. He would start the camera (a Pro 1200 monster which I inherited from him) and focus on an interviewee, then take off one shoe and fling it at the visible wall behind the subject – which might easily have been a flinching Archbishop or a South American dictator, for all Joe Dunne cared. All human beings were accorded equal respect by him, and his primitive technology worked, according to his talented editor Dáibhi Doran.

    As film stock and processing were expensive, the ratio of exposed film to the final product was at most 4:1 and even that, I remember, was extravagant. To save money, every shot involved making up your mind beforehand. Film had some of the physical satisfaction of a sculptor choosing his subject and material and then eliminating all that was superfluous to his or her vision. I liked working with my hands – a trait presumably inherited from my cooper father and every one of his similarly-employed ancestors.  I approached every subject through the prism of my own experience and prejudices. The job was to analyse first impressions, pin down the essential, eliminate the superfluous and then gaily use the material to say what you yourself wanted. Objectivity in TV and film is a myth. The same goes for all of our perceptions.

    The film editor was crucial. The basic skill he demanded from a director or cameraman was a cutaway to any relevant object in the scene. With this he might execute the desired sleight-of-hand transition from one angle or scene to another. That was until Godard made ‘jump-cuts’ fashionable. Dáibhí Doran always called these little cutaways his ‘bananas’ because of the exotic locations frequented by Fr Joe Dunne. ‘Where’s me bananas?’ was his plaintive cry. From Dáibhí, Merritt Butler, Martin Duffy, Victor Power, Bill Lawlor, Gordon Bric, Manuela Corbari and many other patient people, I learned everything worth knowing about film editing, even how to edit my own work. That came in useful in Connemara when I became the only independent film maker outside Dublin. Now I have the impression that there is a standing army of such foolhardy souls vying for pittances from the Irish Film Board – now titled Fís Éirean, which daringly suggests that the state body might have a vision for Ireland.

    Since the microchip has made computers accessible and all the work is now performed on their sophisticated programmes, much of the satisfaction has gone out of the job. I am like a steam train stoker replaced by the diesel engine. The physical approach to the material is obsolete. The director now sits helplessly for hours beside the editor, or is told to come back to-morrow, is sometimes even allowed to voice a suggestion. It is the difference, on the one hand, between the late sculptor James McKenna hacking away for months at wood or stone and, on the other, the subsequent breed of conceptual artists who merely have to state their intentions in order to be taken seriously by art critics.

    For a long time I refused to  learn  the technique of computer editing. Besides, female editors were now in the ascendancy because of their quicker minds and fingers. They also knew that the way to be re-employed was to refrain from telling the director or producer that their material was rubbish. There is no more disillusioned breed than television film editor, male or female. That is part of the reason why the enormous bulk of  TV and film today consists of trailer-trash reality directed by schedulers at female consumers. I call it flatpack film and TV. Anybody can assemble it and at the end it resembles product but it falls apart under close examination.

    The tail is wagging the dog.

    I was lucky. I had so many disparate ideas that I could never hope to express them in formal or traditional artforms. In film I had to filter my ideas through dedicated professional camera, sound and editing people. No matter how chaotic my imperatives might be, those artisans still had to concentrate on their own corner, make sure pictures were appropriate and at least in focus, that the sound was crisp and clear, that the ingredients could be cut together in some coherent way. This was the only process that could have disciplined me and I am indebted to all of those people who kept me up on the tightrope. They are the real artists. We directors are the flippertygibbets and I suppose we have some higher purpose but I no longer can remember what it is.

    Alas, in the craven new world of film and TV, the director has slipped down the ratings and now is more like a bus driver, merely keeping tightly to a schedule and subject to ticket inspectors – the bean-counting executive producers. My brilliant director son modestly describes the job as shot harvesting.

    The apparatchik reigns, the auteur is dead. So are Kieslowski and Tarkovsky, both at too early an age.  My theory is that they died of shock, along with eastern-bloc Socialism which, despite its repression of ordinary citizens, had actually nurtured their genius. The field of art was regarded as a legitimate battlefield between ideologies. Artists were cherished as front-line combatants. When the Iron Curtain vanished so did the concept of film as State-supported art. Those two eminent film makers’ optimistic embrace of Western freedom and democracy exposed them to a harsh market ruled by pragmatism and bean counting. Having survived the heirs of Stalinism they perished under global capitalism.

    The irony is that this petty island of Ireland, which always stoutly denounced the evils of socialism and was itself denounced for aesthetic narrow-mindedness, is the only State that now officially and consistently supports the individual artist with an institution called Aosdána. And the politician responsible for realising this vision? The much-derided but far-sighted Charles J. Haughey. He knew that the new economic reality of Globalism would turn us all into homeless beggars or advertising whores.

    Feature Image: © Hugh O’Conor.

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  • A Monk Manqué II: Thaura Mornton

    Back to love and sex. Liking is preferable to loving – and less conducive to heartache. Youth is oblivious to that boring truth.

    The unbiddable first love of my life lived in Terenure, Dublin, a half a mile away from me and I called her Thaura Mornton. We were equally devoted to amateur theatricals.

    She was sixteen when I, returned from my first migration to London, standing in the wings of the Marian Hall, Milltown, first saw her onstage singing ‘Tony from America’, a number from Lionel Monckton’s ‘Quaker Girl’ musical comedy. In the middle of the song she grinned offstage and winked at me. I was smitten. She was an elusive butterfly and led me in a delightful gavotte during the years when I was a recidivist emigrant. Thaura was spirited, an only and over-protected child. Her loving father once warned me that whatsoever male harmed her would find a loaded shotgun lodged in his posterior. And discharged.

    At night, therefore, she would climb through her bathroom window, negotiate the roof of a rickety shed and make her way to the hop in Templeogue Lawn Tennis club, amongst whose hormonal boys and girls was the much-adored rugby international, Tony (later Sir Anthony) O’Reilly.

    Inevitably Thaura became pregnant, sadly not by Tony or me, had her baby adopted – in the nineteen fifties girls had little choice – and was taken on a grand tour of Europe by her maiden aunt. I still possess the single  breathless postcard she sent me from Rome; ‘Everything is so beautiful’, she wrote.

    When she returned she still led me in a merry dance of frustration and obsession. When I saw the film Carmen Jones – Hammerstein’s improvement on Bizet’s opera – I understood her better. She even looked like Dorothy Dandridge. For me she was that love which is ‘a baby that grows up wild and won’t do what you want it to’. But the chase was everything. I saw her as untamed, the perfect companion for my adventures.

    When the Betty Ann Norton School of Acting decided to put on an amateur production of Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ they cast Thaura and myself in the lead parts of George & Emily. My joy was unconfined: my romantic delusion and myself would be working closely together every night for a few weeks. The idyll lasted a single rehearsal when the director became ill and the show was cancelled. Life went frustratingly on, punctuated by hard-earned rendevouz which the lady in question often cancelled at short notice. I simply could not understand her.

    However, walking her home one evening after a film in the Theatre De Luxe cinema in Camden St., she demanded: ‘When are you going to get a real job and settle down?’ At twenty-one I had already been a bored civil servant, factory worker, failed student and aspirant writer, unemployed again.

    The penny dropped; she wanted security, had become broody. Her question made me realise that even her irrepressible spirit had bowed to the ambitions of muddle-class slurbia. It was like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. She had contracted ordinariness, had capitulated to respectability, to browbeating nuns and Christian Brothers, to frowning teachers and concerned parents to whose concerns I had never managed to pay attention – which fault  she had easily identified in me. I was not what she actually wanted in a mate.  So, as per usual I ran and as usual was wrong.

    In the following years Thaura and I had the occasional brief reunion. Years passed before she kissed me goodnight with the softest lips in the world. I was on the point of emigrating again, this time to Canada and here was my lost love suggesting I take her with me. I thought long and hard, regretfully said no.  Her reverse capitulation had come too late. By that time I had also shifted my sights, adopted a different ambition, that of changing the world. It was by now the nineteen-sixties and I was still baying at the moon.

    Even more years later, each well married to strangers, Thaura and I together polished off a bottle of whiskey in one sitting. We laughed and mocked our younger selves until tears came to our eyes. I lost touch again, forever. I heard that she died sitting alone in her armchair, aged fifty something. We had never become, in the biblical sense, one.

    Bob Quinn, pictured in 1952.

    There always is, or should be, somebody like that in a life. James Joyce got it right in ‘The Dead’: a might-have-been love against which no subsequent union can compete.

    The need for the ‘one’, a real or imaginary at-onement, is a powerful urge springing from our time as protoplasmic life forms which reproduced themselves. They can’t have had much fun four million years ago… they merely split in two. Once those simple organisms were divided we were lost, like garden worms bisected by a spade, wriggling frantically to find our other half, condemned to seek a soulmate who would spiritually complete them – and  satisfy basic drives.

    ‘All man’s miseries’ wrote Blaise Pascal, ‘derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’

    Gradually, the  most elemental  human instinct was romanticised and called love. Worse, for us naïve Catholic youngsters the delightful illusions of romance were transubstantiated into a spiritual straitjacket. In Christian circles it was called ‘atonement’ and cleverly channelled into a guilt trip about sins to be atoned for. What a joke! We would have been better left to our own devices, even if it meant being Tom Eliot’s ‘ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas’. The psychic wounds acquired in that battle between religion and libido left scars forever unhealed and unsuccessfully ignored.  Ask any celibate priest.

    Religion was the first and most successful multinational industry in Ireland. The only native entrepreneur who could compete with it was Arthur Guinness. My father and one brother each spent forty years in St. James Gate Brewery constructing barrels for Uncle Arthur’s brew. This aversion therapy meant that neither died of the free beer or ruined livers, the fate of many of their fellow tradesmen.

    Before Guinness arrived the  Irish Bishop seems to have made an unspoken pact with the Irish Politician: ‘You keep ‘em poor and we’ll keep ‘em ignorant’. Soon he made another treaty, this time with Arthur Guinness: ‘We’ll keep ‘em ignorant and you keep ‘em drunk’.

    The Bishop would never tolerate earthly aspirations. His and the brewer’s captive imbibers of Faith ended up as guilt-ridden, frustrated, self-flagellating, unhappy topers. Many intelligent Irish males suffered this fate and justified silent movie star Louise Brooks’ description of us as ‘the worst lovers in the world’. Some did their best to avoid emasculation. They became entertainers, poets, novelists, journalists, fast talkers, hustlers, petty criminals, moneylenders, politicians, bankers and other drunks. But they kept on wearing the green jersey  and going to mass on Sunday.

    My father was a lifelong teetotaller because his own father – also a cooper, as were all his forefathers back to 1798 – had died young and alcoholic. In my long life I may have consumed beer  enough for all three of us.

    Drunkenness was a sin; but did you know that the respectable business of banking was also once a sin, worse, a ‘mortaller’, as we knew it. In more frank times  banking was called usury or money-lending and was damned by the major religions. Now the innocuous term ‘banking’ covers a multitude of heinous crimes in comparison with which drinking  is akin to being in a state of grace. Banking is no less than usury in a collar and tie. At least pawnbrokers were a service for the poor. On Fridays, on my way home from Synge Street school in the No. 83 bus queue at Leonard’s Corner I would notice weary Kimmage housewives bearing their husband’s good suits home, having redeemed them from the pawn shops in Camden street where the  precious garments had lain since Monday morning as security for borrowed money.

    Up to medieval times the only people forced to dirty their hands with lucre and commit the sin of lending at exorbitant rates were Jews because they weren’t allowed do anything else. When that talented people demonstrated what an excellent way it was to make money, the Christians (notably the de Medicis in Florence and the merchants of Venice) took over the business – ‘How odd of God to choose the Jews’ – damned the unfortunates as God-killers and respectabilised their own unscrupulous moneylenders by calling them bankers. As Gore Vidal pointed out, human beings are enemies of all vice that is not directly profitable.

    Historical, anti- Anti-semitism’s roots may be a perverse symptom of Christian guilt. i.e. embracing the sin, hating the sinner.

    Read the first installment of Bob Quinn’s memoir here.

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  • A Monk Manqué

    PROLOGUE

    ‘The reverend Judge leaned over and addressed the defendant’

    ‘I have taken your spotless record into account.’

    ‘However…by the power vested in me I am obliged to sentence you to three score years and ten, maybe more, maybe less.’

    ‘You will serve this time in an open facility.’

    ‘Allowing for the normal remission for good behaviour as well as dungeon fire and sword, flood, war, illness, acts of God, built-in obsolescence and unforeseen accidents, you will enjoy a limited amount of personal freedom.’

    ‘As soon as you have interiorised the rules you will be left to your own devices.’

    ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul.’

    The newcomer beamed up at the man with the dog collar and gurgled happily.

    ‘Goochy goochy,’ smiled the Judge as he dribbled icy water from a chalice, down onto the infant’s head.  The victim’s face contorted in shock at this first betrayal and its bawled protests echoed and re-echoed round the cathedral walls.

     

    A MONK MANQUE

     

    1/  Birthday

    The recommended way to tiptoe through one’s eighties is to move as appropriately, delicately and prudently  as possible.

    But Oscar Wilde knew that ‘the tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is still young.’  Picasso agreed: ‘It takes a long time to grow young.’

    Therefore, as the sun sets over your absent-minded yardarm there remains a sliver of light and life, a tincture of  your compos (or, if you prefer, compost) mentis, implying the detritus of a long life. In the face of imminent extinction an extra birthday should be less a celebration than an act of defiance, a flinging of caution to the winds. What have you to lose? A dribble of sand in your hourglass? A narrowing shadow on your sundial, a mark on the wall of your cell, an acceptable stay of execution – anything but the conventional wisdom of decrepitude. Just face the fact that life has lived you, rather than the reverse.

    On such an occasion avoid the liars who say: You’re Looking Great, Haven’t Changed a Bit. Translated, they are saying ‘you’re fucked.’

    My exact contemporary, holocaust survivor Ben Barenholtz, who produced Coen brothers films and brought bread and vodka for he and I  to ritually consume at the Galway Film Fleadh, told me he had an ex-friend, another liar who had said exactly the same thing to him every year for the previous twenty years.

    The amusing thing about this compliment is that we ancients can’t help believing it. We skip and dance down the road – a pathetic, not to say gruesome image until we are forced to pause for breath. We then resemble the attitude of the nun in Elizabeth Jenning’s poem who was breathless with adoration. The cruel realisation is that we have simply run out of puff. In a Copenhagen pub not long ago that truth dawned on me in the company of two of my sons when I couldn’t resist dancing a hornpipe with a lovely young stranger. My legs needed  a rickshaw taxi to get me back to the hotel while my fine sons continued their frolics until morning.

    My actual state of health – fit  as a trout in the opinion of doctors – is ironic. The pair of elderly Jehovah Witnesses who used call to my door, assuring  me I could live to be one hundred and fifty if I accepted Jehovah, stopped visiting when I rejected their kind offer by quoting George Gershwin –  loudly and in song

    ‘Oh, Methusaleh lived 900 years, but who calls that livin’ when no gal will give in to no man who’s 900 years…’

    There’s the rub. As many of our faculties slither into the wings, the biological imperative insists on slyly hanging around, hoping like Lazarus for stray crumbs. When he was in his fifties actor Rod Steiger blamed his manic depression on those unreliable faculties. Myself, twenty five years younger than Steiger, had already intuited the tragic side of the human comedy.

    But then I had the accumulated experience of  three centuries – the 19tht, 20tth and 21stst – and five generations of my tribe. Three of my late grandparents – I never met the fourth – were born in the eighteen eighties and are as vivid and present to me in this room as their great-grandchildren when the latter noisily visit me. I can see all their faces, hear their voices, remember their gestures as well as I do those of my parents and my own children and grandchildren. Assuredly as their DNA, much of their experiences must lurk in my consciousness, co-exist in my eyes and ears – through which, after all, come my only perception of reality – and are as real to me as the screen before my eyes or the billion-celled stew of cells bubbling in the cauldron of our shared genes. This room is crowded and can be disturbing  to one who always fled the proprietary demands of the tribe. To age is not to run out of ideas but to acquire a confusion of ghosts amidst the living.

    They, young and old, are all here and not here, as simultaneously as Schroedinger’s cats. They so vividly exist, so demanding of my attention, that my direct and indirect human experience amounts to nearly one hundred and fifty years, just as the Jehovahs promised! So why am I not yet a wise and quiescent old man, nodding by the fire?

    The reason is that I am male.

    Females are blessed. They may suffer in our coming and going, but in time most of them lose interest in things libidinous – their body instructs them so – and they achieve a kind of equilibrium. Their vanity takes a different form – pride in their home, their children, an inside track to God and love of cats. They live longer than males by ceasing to chase windmills, by settling for less: security.

    In my experience males were once listened to and females could safely be leered at. This was disastrous for both. The former became bores, the latter withered under the stares. Suddenly everything is reversed. Males are tentative and silent; females are garrulous.and assertive, to me an interesting evolutionary experiment.  Mature, compliant females are an oxymoron but, as with unicorns, males still believe in  the myth.

    Such creatures must exist somewhere. Otherwise life is not worth living. Males are condemned to this poetic possibility ad infinitum or longer, a lifetime. Patsy Murphy diagnosed us as having ‘too much libido’. The libido is the killer, nature’s trick to keep the species going. A person can die of it.

    Fifty years ago they conducted an experiment in the University of Berkeley (named after an Irishman, wouldn’t you know!) in California. They immersed a healthy male human specimen in a saline solution at body temperature. He floated as lightly as if he were in the Dead Sea. They doused the lights and plugged his ears. He was rendered sense-less, devoid of all stimulation. The outcome? Involuntary erection. I’ve read that it also happens to hanged men. Is that what Dylan Thomas, at nineteen, intuited when he wrote of  the force that through the green fuse drives the flower? The French writer Michel Houellebeq is obsessed with the phenomenon, gaily mixing philosophy and social commentary and ending up with with sheer pornography. I would guess it has made him a Franc millionaire.

    The fading of the faculties, the sense of impending annihilation, is the greatest imperative since Henry Kissinger boasted about the aphrodisiacal qualities of power. Hence the epithet: Dirty Old Man. Kurt Vonnegut jr. was more charitable when he wrote to me (always in block capitals on postcards): OLD MEN ARE OBSCENE AND ACCURATE.

    Mr Vonnegut was my late and great penfriend who, like George Bernard Shaw conducted his correspondence by postcard. One of them was emblazoned: LIFE IS NO WAY TO TREAT AN ANIMAL.

    When Pandora’s box is opened and releases all evils into the world the only thing left is Hope. During the conquest and annihilation of Berlin in 1945, all ages copulated desperately and publicly. Innocent courting games like ‘spin the bottle’ were discarded. Adolescent boys, knowing they would soon die defending their city sought a first and last joyful petit mort. For the girls it was to pre-empt their inevitable rape by a Russian soldier. War has that effect. The youngster were like rabbits transfixed in the headlights of tanks and they grew up faster than Margaret Mead’s famous teenagers in Samoa. They followed their first and last instinct: make love not war – but with somebody suitable. The few remaining active adults led by example. Threatened German cities were like chaotic brothels and all for free. I did not see the city of Munich until a dozen years after the sale was over. My timing is always haywire. Firebombed cities were inhabited by cripples, widows and orphans, many of the latter with high-boned Tatar faces, although starvation must have aggravated  the effect. It is estimated that at the end of that last spot of European bother fifty percent of all surviving German females were raped. I read that in a book. I get all my real information from books. If the internet kills the printed book, my mind will go blank. I often quote Thomas Moore, the Irish balladeer: ‘All my books have been woman’s looks, and follie’s all they’ve taught me.’

    Kurt Vonnegut happened to be in Dresden at the height of its firestorm so he was well qualified to have an opinion.  He briefly summarised the calculated destruction of cities like Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin and Pforzheim with the pithy: ‘So It Goes’.

    So far this seems to be all about love and sex and death? Pretty much. Next to food, what is more important than our driving forces, especially love, the engine room of the ship? We are all Darwinians now. Young optimists believe that love is an experience that is, has been or will be as neat, orderly, delightful and well conducted as ordained by someone called God, a part-time Hollywood producer. I remind ye who keep this faith (while all others are losing theirs)  that ye are not paying attention. The bottle does not spin forever. A love affair is a mini-life: it begins in joy and ends in despair. Roll on the next one. We are a cosmic ditty, accompanied by a honkytonk piano in a sleazy bar.

    Socrates put it more gracefully: ‘much of what men do is a desperate attempt to immortalise themselves; sensible women take the more direct route of having children’. Socrates regarded founding a family as a terror management strategy. The only simple reaction I have to these ponderous considerations is to keep singing and dancing  provided, in keeping with subtle requests, that I do so in the privacy of my own kitchen.

    The truth of that great platitude, ‘yourelookingreathaventchangedabit’ is simply this: you are decommissioned. Writer Joe MacAnthony has described our generation as tourists in the departure lounge.  We are in our anecdotage. Who would have thought that ‘Riobárd’, the child in the frontispiece to these words would survive so long?

    How can I be the same person as  that innocent four-year-old pencilled in my teetol father’s 1940 portrait?

    Riobárd, as the child was named, must have had some intimation of what was ahead of him. How else could innocence survive the tripwires of life? Noam Chomsky said that there is an inbuilt matrix for complex language in a baby. Is there also an inbuilt preparedness for the hard truths of life?

    It is a fact that my Uncle Jim Toner– who had run away from his home in Dublin to join the British Army and survive the slaughter of WWI – long afterwards described me, the child in the portrait, thus: ‘He may be alright but he has the head of a bloody rogue.’

    I overheard that remark and worried about it, but nobody reassured me. Maybe Uncle Jim, a teenager in the Royal Army Medical Corps who had collected body parts of youngsters on the killing fields of Picardy – where the roses bloomed – was reminded of something unbearable in that innocent portrait?

    Back in Dublin from his war service, Uncle Jim married what was known as ‘a servant girl’, begat no children of his own, endured public resentment at his fighting for the Old Enemy and sometime in the nineteen fifties decided to dull his pain with the aid of a gas oven. Post-traumatic stress syndrome was not then recognised. I have looked him up in the British Military Archives. He was awarded  the DCM, abbreviation for Distinguished Conduct Medal, meaning he was immature enough to do something foolhardy in the midst of carnage.

    Conferment of the D.C.M. gallantry award was announced in the London Gazette (1920) and accompanied by a citation.

    Award Details: 61586 Pte. J. Toner.  During the period 17th September to 11th November, 1918, while acting as a bearer, particularly at the capture of Bohain. There being a congestion of wounded, he repeatedly led forward squads of bearers over very difficult country during the night and greatly assisted in the evacuation of them

    This had never been revealed to us children by our nationalist father although my mother, who concealed guns under her dress when céilís were raided during the War of Independence, often said  ‘We were better off under the British.’

    There were other military associations. When the British army abandoned our sacred soil in 1922, my mother’s sister Kathleen ran away with a British Tommy who, like her own father, my grandfather, reared pigs at their home in Berkshire. Their son Sydney, my uncle, became a teenage frogman in WWII and my hero. Years later I enticed Sydney’s daughter Kathy to elope with me to Ireland where we were known for a brief interlude as ‘kissin cousins’. Kathy later married a Red Devil, one of those RAF types who put on daring aerial displays. Admitting these connections makes me wonder if I am not an honorary member of that suspect class, a West Brit or Shoneen.

    For a start, I was born in the Pale. My childhood radio listening consisted mainly of the BBC Home Service because Radio Éireann was broadcast for only a few hours per day. My first language was English, albeit in a dialect light years from the received pronunciation  of the Home Counties BBC accent. My early reading was what we called the comic cuts: The Rover, Hotspur, Eagle, all published in England.  My favourite authors were Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.A. Henty, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, John Wyndham, Leslie Charteris and so forth. Even the Irish language detective story writer Reics Carlo,  who was obligatory reading in school, turned out to be English.

    Among our official heroes, Pádraic Pearse was half-English, James Connolly was half-Scottish and James Larkin was a Liverpudlian. No wonder I am ambivalent about nationalism, both Irish and English. The last night of the Proms in the Albert Hall with its sea of Hooray Henrys roaring out ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ fills me with dismay and not a little envy. Filming American children reciting their oath of allegiance with hands on hearts every morning in school amazed me. Nationalism has become a dirty word in Ireland. How do the English and the Americans get away with their jingoism?

    Perhaps because they are, respectively, past and present empires and Ireland’s only imperial achievements were spiritual and vanished into the ether.

    As very soon must I.

    This started off as a note on my birthday but could end up as a memoir, the grandiloquent lie. Every act of memory is an act of imagination, As all lives end in failure, my guess is that an honest memoir would produce in the reader a depression as deep as Killary Harbour.

    Therefore this must, de facto, be another fictional memoir, a scrapbook, an anecdotal antidote to a life. Fortunately I am a magpie and keep the evidence: love letters, photos, notes, theatre programmes, membership cards, birth, marriage and death certificates, diaries, expired passports, manuscripts, film scripts, and so on and so forth. How I have kept them together after a peripatetic life is a wonder, but such memorabilia may keep me relatively, at least chronologically honest. They may raise an occasional giggle or even a sharp intake of breath in the wrong places.

    I am past caring, one of the few benefits of ageing.

    Bob Quinn is an Irish filmmaker, writer and photographer. His documentary work includes Atlantean, a series of four documentaries about the origins of the Irish people.

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