The Snug: A Blog

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country.

                            Edna O'Brien

At last...Ireland! (How suitable to re-connect with the Ireland of my youth on St. Patrick's Day.) Well, technically, yes, but it was actually Northern Ireland I ended up in. I worked that out from the name of the institution that accepted me as a student: the University of Ulster. I’d sent out applications, on my return to Geneva from Athens, to the universities of (if memory serves) Kiev, Salamanca, Leningrad, Geneva itself, Bologna, Trinity College Dublin, and–the result of a haphazard discovery in a directory–the University of Ulster. I never heard from Bologna, and the rest gave me the fig in various ways, which left the sole acceptor, the U. of U., whose home address was Coleraine, Co. Londonderry, Northern Ireland, U.K. Londonderry? Surely that should have been a giveaway. But in those days Ireland was Ireland to me, and I saw the respective vagaries of the Orangemen and the IRA as mere greenish and orangeish hues on an all-Irish spectrum, thoroughly Irish eccentricities that were certainly not to be taken seriously. I was going back to my ancestral home, to the hog heavens and townlands of long-dead Boylans and McRorys; and that was all that mattered.

     After my return to Geneva from Athens, I swanned about in the imaginary silk robes of my poetic personality, following a routine of Bohemian idleness to which I often reverted in later years (only to do penance for it in even later years). I spent my abundant time and scant money in cafes—money, incidentally, that Mother hard-earned in a series of U.N. secretarial jobs that must have eaten steadily away at her once-rebellious pride, although it was that selfsame pride that had driven her to tell Dad to get lost when he imperiously—and with the brass of a Victorian door-knocker, considering what he’d put her, us, through—summoned us to join him back in the States, whither he'd returned, on pain of being sliced and diced by the Irish Labour Ministry…well, she was having none of that. York, Pa.? Philly? Claymont, Del.? No, thanks. She liked living in Geneva, and in order to continue doing so she was prepared to accept the humility of secretarial servitude to empty-souled U.N. bureaucrats in Switzerland.  

           Ireland, of course, is, or was, the opposite of Switzerland, except for the tough, grim survival and the heavy drinking. Deeply tribal, rough of texture, carved of prehistory. A Neolithic nation that awoke in the nineteenth century, a nineteenth-century society up to about the time I went to university there; then, as John McGahern has it, “it almost bypassed the twentieth century.” (Indeed: The best of the Irish twentieth century was represented by the Irish abroad: Joyce, Beckett, Padraic Colum, Edna O’Brien.) Her quiddity, her peatiness, her anti-Swissness: all were irresistible. I’d become intoxicated on her yeasty misty fuggy air. In Irish literature I’d found McRorys, and Rogerses, and Boyles, and O’Boyles, and there were even Irish authors named Boylan (Clare and Henry, and a monk named Dom Eugene, author of the splendidly-titled That Tremendous Lover). And there was the name of a fictional relative, my imaginary great-uncle Hugh Boylan, nicknamed “Blazes,” in Joyce’s Ulysses! Speaking of which, it’s hard to remember now what a bloody thrill that book is the very first time you read it. By now, of course, it’s been out for nearly a hundred years and pounded into papier-mâché by innumerable bores of psycho-political stripe, but try to imagine never having heard of it or of Saint Jim’s travails in Trieste and Paris and Zurich or of “stately, plump Buck Mulligan”—and go and take a running jump and dive into it as the young Joyce dove off the Forty-Foot at Sandycove. It’s bracing, and thrilling, and it’s more at home in the bog than in the bogs—and THAT was a revelation, not just to the world of letters which JJ grabbed by the scruff of the neck and half-nelsoned into submission, but to me.

    Yet the greatest thrill of all was that name Boylan, attached to a grand old-fashioned Irish rogue with a spring in his step and sexy Molly Bloom at the end of the line.

                                               *         *         *         *         *

    And the end of the line is where you’ll find Coleraine, Co. (London) Derry, home of the University of Ulster, my newest future alma mater. Mum saw me off with her usual mixture of relief and sadness; I bade her farewell with the same mélange. En route, via Paris (a couple of hours’ layover, long enough to walk via a café or two from Gare de Lyon to Gare du Nord) and London, I was burdened with emerald-green dreams and the same steamer trunk that had accompanied me to and from Greece. The driver at the Busaras in Dublin loaded it on board muttering “what do ya have in the bloody thing, army boots? Ya’re Special Branch, arencha?” Then, as an introduction to the grand healthy nation that was then Ireland, he enunciated an elaborate coughing narrative in many chapters, at the epilogue of which he took his place behind the wheel, still gagging, sparks flying from his fag, from which he lit another.

    Ah, the Ireland that was!

    The trip from Dublin took about four hours on the twisty back roads that were long-ago Ireland’s expressways. We passed the ancient Boylan hog holdings of Co. Monaghan (a light bulb in a solitary farmhouse glimmered in the gloaming) and crossed the Border at Keady, Co. Armagh into the Most Loyal and Rebellious Province of Ulster. Her Majesty’s red phone booths and mailboxes succeeded the Republic’s cream-and-green ones, and the token Erse disappeared from the road signs. I was among the Boers of Europe. Forward progress was held back by Army patrols, rumors of bomb scares, and our driver’s terminal tuberculosis. Over a cup of milky tea in Dungannon I had a good look at the local visages and was impressed by their acne-scarred pastiness. Well, I thought, I’ll blend right in.

    It was eleven at night and raining when we arrived in Coleraine. Empty streets shone in the bluish light of the streetlamps. I got off at the King William Hotel. Coughing echoed from somewhere down the little wet alleyways. The driver coughed boisterously back, as in hopeful reply to a mating call.

    “I know a bloody job-lot of army boots when I see one, but,” he gasped. “Yer Special Branch, arencha?”

     “Yes,” I said, to humor the man. “Spot on. I’m Special Branch, all right. But don’t tell no one, OK?”

      The owner of the King William Hotel was a bulky, florid-faced Ulster Protestant, a species with which I was then unfamiliar. He gave me a crash course in the blockheadedness of the breed, taking a very dim view of a) me showing up at eleven p.m.; b) me demanding to be fed; c) me ordering several pints of Guinness after the bar was closed; and finally d) me tipsily singing the praises of Dublin and Connemara and Galway and other corners of the Popish “South.”

   “Dunno,” he growled. “Never been dyne Sythe. Never wanted to go. Ay’m Bruttish. And ye’re, eh…?” He glanced at my name on the register: A papist, for sure. 

     “More Guinness, eh?”

     “Sure.”

     Casting about for topics of conversation, I noticed behind him a portrait of a silly-looking git in a shoulder-length wig, sitting bolt upright on a horse. It was, of course, the defunct monarch after whom the hostelry was named, good King William, hero of the Protestant “victory” over Catholic King James in 1690 and the household god of Protestant Ulster, but I was green in more senses than one.

    “Who the fuck’s that?” I inquired. “Tiny Tim?[1]”

    Mine host promptly extinguished the lights and withdrew to the hidden fastnesses of the hotel, muttering Orange imprecations fashioned from, or heavily derivative of, the word he pronounced “fock.” I was left in the smoke- and stout-scented dark, with only a winking neon “Hotel” light outside the window to guide my weaving footsteps bedward.

    So already, on my first night in the North, I’d put my foot in it.