Dear Fr Egan,
I picked up your letter and enclosures when in Dublin yesterday and now hasten to reply so you’ll have our permanent address — I mean as permanent as an address can be when heaven’s our destination. […] Art slipped me a twenty when we left that morning for New York, and that just about completed my drive. I now owe everyone something — you the most — and I’d suffer more than I do — I do suffer considerably, by the way — if it weren’t that the thing I do is priceless. At the moment the thing I’m doing is lighting a pipeful of Carroll’s Donegal (Aromatic) Sliced Plug, and a little later on I’ll open a bottle of Guinness — run by the Freemasons, by the way. Then I’ll maybe jot down a few pages of my memoirs. I’ve given up stories and the novel I used to talk about — when I’d talk, that is, for I’ve not forgotten your complaint about my silence, my unwillingness just to sit and talk for days on end, your comparing me with one other friend. I’m calling the new book My Turn to Make the Tea. There’s another one out by that title, by Monica Dickens, […] but by the time mine is out, I daresay the title will sound fresh again. […]
Yesterday we started having a maid. She asked for 25 shillings, or bob, a week, and so we are magnanimously paying her 30—I wonder how are things down below for those who defraud the workers. Still, it’s that way all over. She’s just a kid, 16, […] about ten kids in her family, went through the eighth grade — to get to this position in the world. […] Life is real, earnest, tough, for most people in Ireland who have to work, I think.
A paperhanger told me that only 10 percent of the people in Greystones have to work; all retired, ex — army men, pensions, coupon clippers, and 95 percent pro-British, he said. He was himself, it turned out, told me Guinness was run by the Freemasons, as indeed everything really big is, to which I showed no feelings one way or the other — fortunately, I guess, because he ultimately showed that he believed that to be the way things ought to be. He thought I must be Protestant — because American, I guess — and spoke for a while about “us,” how we have incentive, “they” don’t, hence the situation he described. Irish, he said, the victim of large families. If they’d just use their heads, lay in a little contraceptive jelly, well, they might have a chance. I pointed out it would go hard with “us” then, nobody to wait on us, no poverty-stricken large families condemned to carry our water, hew our wood, for what we’d be willing and able to pay. When I confessed to being a Catholic, the conversation tapered off, and a good thing, for I was weary of homely wisdom. I gather, in little ways, that the Catholic government is the opposite side of the coin that has tails on both sides. Nobody can win for losing. I send you the latest list of censored books. But it’s a beautiful place, everything I dreamed it might be, a lot draftier in the house — I didn’t dream of that — but the water, the green, the vines, stone walls, the pace, all to my taste, and the meat and drink, likewise, mea culpa. […]
I’m glad you sold the DeSoto, I never liked it, now I can tell you. […] Yours, fondly.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Dysart, Kimberley Road
Greystones, County Wicklow
December 22, 1951
Dear Fr Egan,
You are the first one (outside the family) to see our new stationery. Please let me know what you think, if favorable. I felt I ought to have it to answer numerous inquiries that come my way, mostly regarding literary matters, but unfortunately none has arrived since the stationery did. Maybe something Monday.
Glad you now approve move to Ireland. I’d like to have a house like this in U.S. Eight rooms, laid out longwise, rather than squarewise, so one puts some distance between himself and, say, the children. I will also need a fireplace in my permanent home, preferably a small coal-burning one such as the Marlborough, I suspect, had originally. I like to stand in front of it with pipe or glass. Back to Thackeray!
Fr Fennelly, our PP,2 dropped in this afternoon. He must be sixty, or close to it, and his conversation seemed to say that he’d just been given a parish, Holy Rosary, Greystones (the church on the postcard I sent), last summer. He’s got a heating problem, and over that the problem of getting people to contribute in general. Says they don’t realize times have changed and they—“the ordinary man,” one of his phrases — have to do what their betters did in palmier days. Offhand, I’d say he’s asking for it (just like a young pastor in the U.S.), trying to get people to use a missal and do their part, and he refuses to use a form (in which parishioners’ past performances would be published for all to see and handicap). He’s not a victim, however, not a softy full of theory. He seems to admire Spain (before Franco), has no time for America or Britain, speaks of the old families with their sense of noblesse oblige, and is an author (a book of prayer for children and some other stuff, not clear what, written as a curate and therefore, he said, “anonymously”). I think he’s lonesome, but doubt that I’m the one to fill his evenings. […]
You’ll be gratified, I hope, to know that in the past week I’ve been shown how right you can be sometimes when you sound pretty far gone. We have had bad cases of the crabs, or lice, both girls and Betty (only mildly). I favor capital punishment in this matter for the disseminators. Mr Power, the local chemist, hopes we don’t blame Ireland for our trouble. It’s touching to see people like him, so hopeful that we’ll like Ireland, won’t think it too slow, etc. I think most opinion of the U.S. here is reached through listening to returned stage performers tell about it, about Broadway, Times Square. I told Mr Power he doesn’t know the meaning of slow and would be glad to give him the name of a PP who does. […]
My turn to make the tea. Guinness has gone up l d., but they’re increasing the specific gravity. Can’t get Smucker’s here. We have to settle for Fruitfield. They’re a good house but no Smucker’s. Fairly Happy New Year!
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Dysart
March 8, 1952
Dear Father Egan,
[…] I haven’t seen Commonweal for a while. It comes in spurts. Here I read The Irish Times, The Times (London), Time, the Wicklow People, the Standard, the Catholic Herald, The Observer (Sunday, London), the Sunday Times (London, not the aforementioned). I think there’s room for another paper, preferably one with the word “Times” in it, say, The Catholic Times, here. Except for The Irish Times, the Irish papers are awful; Sunday Visitor stuff, cutouts for children, a dress pattern for mother, sports for dad. As the new nuncio (O’Hara) said, Ireland is one country that works hand in glove with Rome. The press shows it — except The Irish Times, which is Anglo-Irish literate. The Standard is good for a diocesan paper but full of the usual junk too, enroll in the Golden Book of Our Lady of Something, Liverpool, only
I had dinner at the Bailey — a restaurant in Dublin — with Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor the other night. Liked them both. O’C. is going to the U.S., hopes to settle there, can’t live or write here, he says, because of “personal troubles,” meaning his marital troubles, I guess. He now has an English wife, an Irish one here, numerous children, etc. O’F. is riding it — being happily married, it appears — riding it out on purer lines, the problem with being a writer in Ireland, I mean. O’C. said it would be impossible for him or O’F. to live anywhere but in Dublin, in Ireland; O’F. seemed to agree they’d be in physical danger in Cork, where they both come from. They were stunned to discover that I’d been employed by Marquette. O’F. is very calm, cool, and, I suspect, long-suffering … O’C. great admirer of A. E. Coppard and Saroyan. O’F. might have been a Dublin businessman, from his dress, dark suit, white shirt; O’C. raffish, orange wool shirt, wool tie, blue tam. O’F. in good health. O’C. has trouble with his liver, his wife tells him what he can eat, drinks light wines and lime juice. He paid the bill. That sums up the evening, my impressions. “Urbs Intacta” was the only Latin used — by Mrs O’F. — referring to Waterford, which she belittled, and fortunately I picked up on “Urbs.” “Inter alia,” I said, urbanely, “wasn’t that a long time ago?” I was smoking some small black cigars — Wills’s Whiffs — and probably made a very good impression, seen from the tables around us. We had Vichy water at the very end. Trying to cap that, I called for a jar of Smucker’s, but they couldn’t provide it. “What! No Smucker’s!” I cried, which got over the idea that the management, and indeed everyone, including parties all around us, had a lot to learn. “1943 is the best year,” I said. “’45 is acceptable.” Then I went on to tell them about that little place in Chicago that I took you to, not much to look at and all that, but what food, what service! […]