The Snug: A Blog

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.                                                                                                                                   The train journey itself, which took three days and three nights from Lausanne to Athens (via Milan, Trieste, Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje, and Salonika), and my subsequent sojourn in Greece, introduced me to the most extreme form of two sensations: loneliness and nostalgia. Throughout the long passage through then-Yugoslavia I sat sleepless, thinking of home--the garden, the owls, the blue Jura mountains--and staring fixedly at the identical but reversed face in the window and the drab world beyond, the surly bondage and resentment of the Serbs and Croats that I’m tempted to see in hindsight as primed for a Milosevic or Karodzic to come along and kick into snarling action, like half-starved curs. Every visit to the nations of ex-Yugoslavia reinforced the impression that they, whether they call themselves Croats, Serbs or Bosnians, were and are unhappy together and unhappier apart, the very embodiments of the gloomy Slav...but that might have been just me.  

     “Lamps mitt,” he said.

     “What kind?”

    “Lamps mitt. Yes, pliss.”

    It was the extent of his English, and of my patience. Whether it was diced sewer rat or chopped guinea pig, I was hungry enough for any old “lamps mitt.” Then, as I was counting out my dinars, a whistle sounded behind me and the Orient Express pulled briskly away from the platform. I screamed at the vendor in schoolboy Russian to hurry (“byistro! byistro!”), but he chuckled and prolonged by about three minutes the time it normally took him to assemble a lump-of-meat sandwich, while I glanced back and forth in desperation from the food I craved to the train that was clanking obliviously away into the night with my steamer trunk and passport, leaving me in the middle of darkest Serbia with no belongings, no identification, and no ability to communicate. It was extreme panic, overridden by hunger. I grabbed the sandwich when he’d finally finished with it and took to my heels in fruitless pursuit. The train’s wagging red dorsal light soon disappeared into the night. Alone on the platform, I stood staring at the quiet gleam of the empty rails and mechanically gobbled my sandwich. Well, I thought, invoking the protective deity of my birth-nationality in extremis as atheists in foxholes are said to suddenly acknowledge God: There must be an American consulate somewhere. I’d eaten, anyway, the gristly fare of grisly Slobbovia. And I had Greek drachmas on me, and leftover Swiss francs. My first order of business was to find a telephone, and I was looking for one when–presto! Like a timid paramour, the Orient Express coyly reappeared, slowly backing into the station, and came to a halt along another platform in a great Westinghousian wheeze of brakes. I ran across the tracks and climbed aboard and succeeded in parting the throngs of unshaven Serbian sex maniacs besieging the Canadian lady and sought refuge behind my compartment door. In my head ran the full-length feature of which Fate had just given me a grim little preview: abandonment, disgrace, imprisonment, deportation. The Serbs in the corridor attempted a final, futile assault on the Canadian lady’s redoubt, then finally dispersed in frustration when a strident conductor, newly-arrived, sent them packing. Through the rest of dingy Serbia and Bosnia and Macedonia I slept, stomach roiling uneasily. Then—efharisto poli, passaporti! Greece again. 

Beware the writer who sets himself or herself up as the voice of a nation. This includes nations of race, gender, sexual orientation, elective affinity. . . The New Behalfism demands uplift, accentuates the positive, offers stirring moral instruction. It abhors the tragic sense of life. Seeing literature as inescapably political, it substitutes political values for literary ones. It is the murderer of thought.

                                                        Sir Salman Rushdie

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Crete had come as part of my all-in-one wanderjahr in Greece. A car trip with two schoolmates through Italy and Greece in the summer after graduation had revived my juvenile Hellenism and turned me into a proto-Hellene. I’d been immersing myself in the bleak and blistering books of Nikos Kazantzakis: Zorba, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis, and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, later parsed for me in Athens by a friend of the book’s translator and of Elena, the great man’s widow and biographer, who lived in Geneva—and to whom I brazenly wrote a letter of self-introduction, to which, surprisingly and graciously, she responded by inviting me to tea in her luxurious apartment on the Quai Gustave-Ador (on the mantelpiece: a signed photograph of President-Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus; above the mantel, a portrait of the late Nikos, peering at far horizons), where we talked about her husband and writing; for she’d never remarried, and was no mean writer herself. She autographed my copy of her biography of Nikos. We had more tea. Smoking was de rigueur then, so we smoked. She lived in Geneva, she explained, out of distaste for the colonels then running Greece.

    But they didn’t bother me, those colonels. For me it was all about Mounts Olympus and Ida and ouzo and the sirtaki and the shivering silvery olive groves of Attica. Greece was this introvert’s way out of himself. It was my destiny, I hollered, my eyes burning with pure self-love. Never mind Britain or Ireland; having followed the British stream at the International School I’d taken my O- and A-levels and scored sufficiently well to be admitted to Keele and Sussex, a couple of perfectly decent new universities that sent me handsome brochures advertising their courses, their campuses, their amenities. But the British Isles wouldn’t do, yet. I came over all (Lawrence) Durrellian about it (come to think of it, it would have been around that time that I read The Alexandria Quartet). Like the Greek-Cypriot freedom fighters, I wanted my own personal Enosis with Hellas. Mum gave in, but on one condition: A plain old gap year wouldn’t do. My footloose foray had to wear dignified pedagogical disguise. So we (well, she) got me enrolled at an English-language school affiliated with the impressive-sounding Hellenic-American Institute, through which a Greek family was contacted to serve as my hosts, and I was on my way. At Lausanne station I hauled an enormous steamer trunk aboard the couchette wagon of the grandly-named Orient Express—yes, that one, but fallen on hard times—and set off through the Balkans for Greece and, I foolishly hoped, some kind of glory. 

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            I glimpsed the wilderness again in Crete. I was at the foot of Mt. Ida, after about two hours’ gut-churning trundle in an old bus from Knossos, the restored Minoan palace just outside Heraklion. It was a hot morning in September 1970, forty summers and a thousand years ago. I was looking for the cave on Mt. Ida in which, it was said (by the D’Aulaires and others), Zeus was born to the goddess Rhea. Coincidentally, in that very same cave the philosopher Epimenides of Knossos, the lying Cretan who said, “All Cretans are liars,” is said to have fallen asleep for fifty-seven years, after which he reportedly awoke with the gift of prophecy. I wondered if I could manage the same feat; or maybe, after a quick nap, just the ability to prophesy a few minutes ahead, say as far as what I’d be having for lunch.

            I got off the bus at a dusty intersection—right for Knossos and Heraklion, left for Agios Nikolaos, then still a sleepy fishing village, not the flash, tawdry resort it's since become—and started walking. After a few minutes I saw a refugee from another age coming down the mountain toward me: tall, with piercing eyes and a bristling mustache, wearing a kind of turban and sash and flared red trousers, like a janissary in a nineteenth-century painting. When he saw me he stopped and stared and returned my muttered greeting with a question I didn’t understand, probably “Where do you think you’re going?” All I could say in Greek with any degree of fluency was “I dislike meatballs” (“the’maressou ne keftedes”), but it seemed inadequate to the occasion, as well as being quite untrue, so I offered no reply. He shrugged and walked on. I walked on, too, in the opposite direction, for an hour or so alongside a narrowing stream, steadily upward, past olive groves and orange trees and orchards and the stone huts of long-gone goatherds. As I slowly climbed the foot of the mountain and arrived on its steeper inclines, the stream vanished into the rocks, and with it vanished all other sounds; in the heat of the sun there was only a windborne silence, pinned to the vast azure above by the whirring of cicadas. The path I was following soon dwindled to little more than a rockfall. The trees became sparse, and the peak of the great pagan mountain soared into a booming blue sky in which eagles or vultures or demiurges slowly wheeled. I stopped and looked around and realized I was sweating more from fear than from the heat. I was about a quarter of the way up and had no inclination to go on. (Mt. Ida is 2400 meters, or about 8000 feet, high, so this was pretty sluggish progress anyway.) There was nothing visible to be afraid of, and at that treeless altitude there were no longer any cicadas. There was no sound at all but the rushing of the wind. There was me, and there was the mountain: in a word, wilderness. Nothing. So, logically, nothing to be afraid of. But it was this very absence that so frightened me, as if the wilderness had opened wide its maw and exhaled malevolently, like an immense serpent. (Of all the writers whose work I know, Algernon Blackwood describes this sensation best: see “The Willows.”) I felt abandoned yet scrutinized, as if Zeus himself were on his way to strike me down, with vengeance in his heart. Or as if Pan might jump out from behind a rock, grinning his humorless satyr’s grin; for I suddenly felt panic, in panic’s Grecian birthplace.[1] My knees buckled. I turned and walked away, slowly at first, then faster; then, once I’d recovered the use of my knees, I gave up all thoughts of continuing with my quest and ran as fast as I could, stu mbling down the mountain, and half-walked, half-ran down the long white dusty road to the intersection and hailed the first bus back to Knossos. A German backpacker offered me his canteen, from which I took a long, grateful drink.

    “You are OK?” he inquired.

    “Thank you, yes.”

    “I like to meet peoples,” he said.

     That evening as I sat at a café in the main square in Heraklion, getting pie-eyed on retsina, the tall bloke I’d seen coming down the mountain strode by in front of me, carrying three or four plastic Spar Market shopping bags bulging with loaves of bread, boxes of cereal, bottles of wine, garlic sausages, cabbages, and other staples. He was heading for the bus stop, and I deduced that he’d just come into town to do a bit of grocery shopping and was now on his back to his home or cave on the side or summit of Mount Ida. Shrines to Zeus and the presence of Pan never occurred to him; he was probably more worried about the TV reception up there and getting a decent slice of prosciutto. He no doubt made the journey weekly, or even daily; he was a commuter who happened to live in a wilderness from which I’d fled, never to return, driven off by my middle-class panic. One man’s wilderness is another’s home sweet home.

As a young would-be writer and budding professional Irishman, I was infatuated with The Ginger Man, the comic masterpiece by Irish-American maestro J. P. Donleavy. I must have read it five times or more, enraptured by its picaresqueness and the absurd tenacity of the hero, Sebastian Dangerfield. Much of the book's influence trickled into my own Killoyle (which had several midwives: Donleavy, Flann O'Brien, Kingsley Amis, Laurence Sterne) ... I've always admired old J.P., not only for his talent, but also for his gutsiness, his originality, and his no-bullshit attitude toward life. You don't mess with the guy. Many have tried; all have regretted it.

"I was not going to let anything be done to that book that was detrimental," he says. "That is why I'm a different kettle of fish to most authors. I've never had anything happen in my life, from the literary world, in the way of a pat on the back or encouragement or anything else. All I've ever known are lawyers and litigation and attacks from every source possible."

Some of these were notorious. When Maurice Girodias, owner of the raunchy Olympia Press, published The Ginger Man under the rubric of pornography, Donleavy sued. Girodias filed a countersuit, and he and Donleavy sued each other back and forth until The Olympia Press went bankrupt and Donleavy's wife bought the rights at auction.  

The Ginger Man made him rich. For many years now, he's lived the life of a country squire in Levington Park, a 170-acre working farm in Co. Westmeath, in the heart of rural Ireland. Long before J.P. owned the place, James Joyce stayed at Levington Park while visiting the nearby town of Mullingar. A scene in Stephen Hero, Joyce's sketch for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, describes the manor: "... [A]n odd irregular house, barely visible from the road, and surrounded by a fair plantation. It was reached by an untended drive and the ground behind it thick with clumps of faded rhododendrons sloped down to the shore of Lough Owel. ... "

At 84, a still-hale Donleavy writes, paints, and draws regularly, but most of all he takes his role as gentleman farmer seriously, having proudly declared Levington Park to be the first farm in Ireland to be free of Genetic Modification ("Frankenfood"). Outside his study window, as he writes, 60 to 80 prize cattle, raised for beef, graze on the lush grass of Co. Westmeath, beneath the restless Irish sky. And all thanks to Sebastian Dangerfield, and a will of iron. A lesson to us all.

While attending the University of Ulster I lived for a year in the pleasant seaside town of Portstewart on the northern coast of Northern Ireland, across from Co. Donegal in the Republic (placing the northernmost point of Ireland in the South: how very Irish). The Scottish islands of Eigg, Mull, and Rhum were visible on the horizon on clear days. The picture above shows the town in the 1960s; it had changed little when I arrived in 1971. I shared a bungalow with three Catholic rebels, one of whom may or may not have had real ties to the IRA; unsurprisingly, I never found out, only suspected (and still do). The bungalow was spacious and new but unheated except by gas meter and, in the boreal winds of Ireland’s northern coast, as cold as an igloo. It was drafty, too; and having been raised in Greater France, where a draft is the devil’s own work, I dreaded the fell effects of the courant d’air and went about during the winter months wrapped in a blanket, like a Sioux chief. To keep warm, we burned great stacks of peat bricks in the tiny fireplace, in the manner of our Erse ancestors of old. (More of this in due course, when the memoir catches up.)

Bohumil Hrabal used to say that he drew his worldview from a dry cleaner's slip he came across in Prague, which warned clients "Some stains can only be removed by the destruction of the material itself." Unknown until he was in his fifties, banned on and off by the Communists, Hrabal had ample opportunity to hone his sense of life's absurdity, a perspective on life specialized in by the Czechs and the Irish (or perhaps I should say the Slavs and the Celts). Another shrewd observation from the author of Closely Watched Trains was "It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls." And in Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, Hrabal plays the note of absurdity to perfection in this brief anecdote:

A new, humorless generation is now arising

It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.

I imagine the earth when I am no more:

Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,

Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.

Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,

Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

                                    Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.

                        P. G. Wodehouse

        We had the fat years, and then Dad’s hubris caught up with him and we had the lean ones. And exactly what does the hubris of an itinerant electronic-bell salesman consist of? Well, I’ll tell you. It consists of not being satisfied with a job that takes you one week to Trondheim and the next to Venice, but of thinking you’ve spotted the main chance in your ancestral land of Ireland and, further, of moonlighting for an Irish firm also trying to get into the then-hot electronic-carillon field (more operational churches in those days, hence more need for chimes)—and then, as if all that weren’t enough, it consists in you hiring people and trying to set up your own company under a false name, in a disused carpet warehouse off Henry Place in Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty, etc., and not bothering to inform the authorities. (Italics very much mine.)

       But this particular fiasco was years in the making, and during that time I acquired the second home in Ireland already mentioned in a previous chapter: a downstairs flat on Morehampton Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4 (pictured above; not as ritzy an address then as it is now), furnished in post-war frumpishness and permanently scented of sour milk and stale pipe tobacco, a heave-inducing mixture. But Dad loved the place, and put me up on a sagging sofa in the sitting room while he slumbered under a single electric heating bar in the chilly little bedroom down the hall. It never occurred to me that the existence of one residence per parent, separated by hundreds of miles, was a sign that all was probably not well; but children, as we know, accept pretty much anything and carry on from there. So I became used to the notion of visiting Dad in Dublin a couple of months out of the year and living with Mum and going to school in Geneva the rest of the time. My visits to the old man were in an odd way a glimpse of the future, fifteen years on, when I, living in New York, would spend many a weekend coughing and shouting and boozing with him in his Wilmington digs, which showed clear signs of having never benefited from a woman’s touch. Similarly, in the Morehampton Road flat Dad had reverted, at the speed of light, to his bachelor ways. Burned matches, half-smoked pipes and cigarette butts filled the ashtrays, all of which had been nicked from cafes and bars and bierstuben across Europe. Radio magazines and unread newspapers spilled over the edges of beerglass-beringed coffee tables. Laundry never made it out of the laundry basket. Rolls of dust dozed in the corners. My mother took a long look on her one and only visit and left to check in at a hotel. But Dad was happy enough. There were the bottles of Guinness. There was a half-Siamese cat that he’d adopted, in fond memory of Pete Toy. There was the tuft-grown back garden with its view of clotheslines and neighbors’ rooftops and the melodious Irish sky. There were the lopsided double-decker buses lumbering like ailing pachyderms up and down Morehampton Road, south to Donnybrook and north to “Cathair,” the city center.  There was the occasional whiff in the air of yeast from the Guinness brewery at St. James’s Gate—where I had my first drink, a free pint of stout after a brewery tour. I was 12 or so and my proud father looked on, claiming me to be 14 and therefore entitled to a drop. We went straight from the brewery to his favorite pub, the now-defunct Mooney’s on Abbey Street, a high-ceilinged place that looked like a church inside. I had my second drink, a half. More than Guinness: It was the bottomless well of Irishry I was drinking at. And when I saw in the National Museum of Ireland and the Long Library at Trinity College the brooch of Tara and the tattered tricolor that had once flown above the GPO in 1916 and the Book of Kells and the Harp not of Brian Boru, my quivering soul heard from afar the soft insistent strumming of Ireland’s melancholy and beautiful past and… I was Irish from that moment. Well, what could you expect? I was an Irish-American, untested by life, of uncertain nationality and romantic disposition. I became then, and have remained, Irish, through all the lesser transformations—Frenchman, Greek, Swiss, Scot, New Yorker—and it’s as a paddy, however self-modified, that I shall die. Yes, I grew up in Florida, then France, then Switzerland, then elsewhere, and I have at times become enamored of Greekness and Frenchness and Italianness, and Americanness, too; but when I first went to Ireland I felt the force that rose through me at the sight of the name “Boylan” on an Irish shop: it was the atavistic force of my ancestors, of ancient Niall and old Great-granda Ned and Granda and all the other McRorys and Boylans up and down all the messy, turbulent years….and I blame my father, in part. He was simply the most Irish man who ever lived. He even wore a stained Donegal cap and smoked a Peterson’s pipe—and these were not affectations. They were near-instinctive responses to what he was. He would have denied it, and he incessantly complained about the “stupid micks,” especially when they began asking him awkward questions along the lines of “Eh, do you have a permit to employ people in the Irish Republic? Eh?” But I recognized him again and again among the Dubliners of Joyce (“Ivy Day in the Committee Room”) and the Corconians of Frank O’Connor and Sean O Faolain and the Monaghan bogmen and gombeen men and other green fools in Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn—and there he is again, danderin’ about with Carleton in Poor Scholar, and over there whiling away a day, a year, a life, at a crossroads in the Tyrone hills somewhere deep in the tales of Benedict Kiely or the gray-shaded verse of Seamus Heaney (give that man a Nobel, it’ll add some color) or the rain-dripping hard-drinking Belfast pubgoers of Sam McAughtry’s pavement paeans…and this hopelessly feckless Irishman, tried to set up, finance, and run an international corporation! It was like handing a ten-year-old the keys to a Ferrari. It was a scenario scripted by one of the Marx brothers, probably Harpo. Oh, Dad knew all there was about electronic carillons, right enough, and as a radio man he was a poor man’s Marconi. But when it came to actually hiring and employing people…well, he did that, too, fair play to him, with many a fond pat on the back and squeeze of the elbow and pint after work. Only he never investigated their backgrounds, nor did he apply to the Labour Ministry for permits for his workers or for himself. And after a few months, as a Yank living in the Irish Republic without a residence permit, never mind if his own Da and Mam were Irish-born (not that he ever bothered to track down the parish records), he was breaking all kinds of laws by just unlocking the door of his Morehampton Road flatlet and stumbling across the threshold every night.