House large, Georgian, scaly-walled affair, with tremendous views of the sea, we have turf in the fireplaces, and I understand the cottage where Bernard Shaw lived is a block farther up this hill we’re on, but I can’t get up the strength to get up there and look at it. If you lived there, I think I might make it; Cyril Cusack, the actor, lives close by, according to the owners of this house (who have moved into a flat, not caring for the breezes), and is a friend of theirs, and we’ve seen Sean O’Faolain once, but there seems to be a shortage of outgoingness, if that’s a word. I feel like the late Aga Khan toward the end, without his padding. Best to you both.
Betty and Jim
DON AND MARY HUMPHREY
Christmas 1957
Dear Don and Mary,
[…] A word about Christmas. I think Betty took it harder than I did, being away from home. Now and then I’d think of the old house — which waited all year to be in style, with its red and green — and feel a dart of pain, some scene, some room, some noise or other, gone, gone, gone. But I didn’t encourage myself along these lines, and now Christmas is all over again — for good, I sometimes think, for me. The kids, I think, had a good time in their youth. We managed to get in quite a bit of stuff, toys and games, and tonight we all had dinner together (Betty and I have been eating in my study, not being able to stand the meals with them), and the plum pudding flaming with Jamaica rum in a darkened room was such a success that we had to do it three times. The turkey, unfrozen, was good; mushrooms and chestnuts in the dressing; and so on. I mention it because, as I said to Betty, I don’t often have such a meal, not as often as I used to, hence my comparative thinness. I am still soft, Don — never fear — but I am thin-soft. Christmas, however, didn’t really come. The weather has something to do with it: in the forties and fifties, some sun, some rain, some fog, some sun, and so on. Church was harrowing, very crowded, and constant coming and going to the Communion rail, no sermon, one song; not just uninspiring but depressing, like a bargain basement with more people than bargains.
I went out looking for an office the other day, in the next town, Dun Laoghaire, or Kingstown, as it used to be, and ran into a literary house agent, or auctioneer, as they’re called here. He had a letter from Bernard Shaw on the wall of his office (having sold Shaw’s cottage in Dalkey). We have an appointment for next week to look at a room over a bookmaker’s premises, the bookmaker (P. Byrne) being the landlord — which could be expensive in the long run, I suppose.
All for now, Don. I don’t have much incentive to write. We did receive one card (Palmquists) from the Movement and were glad to get it.
All for now.
Jim
Next day, Boxing Day. One year ago tonight we had our gala party. How long ago that seems now. Celebrated today at Leopardstown with Sean O’Faolain, who has a car and drove us to the races. Afterward tea and cake at his house and conversation, mostly about America. […]
The next day (Dec. 27). I’m having trouble getting to the post office (which anyway was closed yesterday) with this, but I am glad. For this morning we hit the jackpot: letters and enclosures from Hyneses and O’Connells. I placed them unread at my right hand as I ate a good breakfast of bacon, oatmeal, fruit bread, and tea. Then I retired to my study, and bit by bit — taking about an hour — I got through them, savoring every line. Jody, using two mediums, made it all very vivid to us. And how I’d like to hear Em on Rome. His letter is full of it, and I am almost sold on going there — as a surprising result. I keep hoping, Don, that you’ll somehow be able to make it over here this fall. All for now: I must get back to the letters, plenty of juice and deep-down goodness in them yet. My blessings, then, upon you one and all.
JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL
December 28, 1957
Dear Joe and Jody,
Here it is Saturday night with everybody gone to bed but me and the radio and the turf fire. […] I am smarting from a card I rec’d today from my friend Haskins (who spoke up for the common man last summer, you may remember, one evening at our house), who, referring to my Christmas story in The New Yorker,10 says: “A potboiler, no?” Such blindness, coupled with such impertinence, is hard to take. […] One just doesn’t take up with such people, but having done so long ago, one doesn’t just write them off. What one would like to do is cut off their balls, lovingly, that is, and shake their hand in friendship … […]
Glad to hear Don made it out. There is something very good about Don coming, unannounced out of the night in winter. He used to scratch at the screen in my study. On the other hand, there’s something awful about Don not showing up after announcing he’s coming over, and never a word of explanation. So look out for that.
And now to Jody. We got a terrific lift out of her part of the letter, both the account of an evening in the Movement and her sketches. I call that talent, literary or not; the lovely still life. I do hope she continues along this line. I want the whole damn gallery. We had a letter from Em in the same mail with yours, and I find I can’t get enough of that photo of him and the pope. I keep looking at it; pornography was never so sweet in my youth. Pope and Anti-Pope, I call it, or More Popish Than the Pope. We can all be proud of Em, and I meant to tell him so in my next letter, which will be coming very soon. Don’t think I haven’t lamented to Betty that we had to be away from the scene this fall. The Movement is really jumping. I hope you aren’t so blind that you can’t see that. You are very fortunate to be living in this time in that place … […] Now I must close.
Jim
That winter, the weather was said to be the worst in Ireland in sixty years. Drafty, high ceilinged, and absent “a little thing called central heating,” Ard na Fairrge possessed a deadly chill such as Jim and Betty (and the children) had never experienced.
FRED AND ROMY PETTERS
Ard na Fairrge
Mount Salus
Dalkey, County Dublin
[early January] 1958
Dear Fred and Romy,
We were so glad to hear from you, and I know I thought many times of your living room during the Christmastime, of the trees I’d seen there and the one you probably had. It will be a sad day for you, if it ever comes, when you have to do with a commercial tree. […]
This is a Saturday afternoon with a gale blowing, the sea looking like a picture in an old book of photographs, rough, grey, the only things missing a destroyer or two and a U-boat. […] Betty has taken the last week pretty hard, the cold, I mean. It has been down to 25, which is quite an ordeal here, worse than 25 below in Minnesota — for, you see, we are heating by fireplace and in rooms with 12-foot ceilings (the one in the front hallway is as high as the house). Fortunately for all concerned, I don’t have to get up as early as the others in the morning, when it’s chilliest. […]
Yes, Fred, do write and tell us of “a suitable house”—you know there isn’t one. We do miss you all, as I keep saying, have raised you all to your proper heroic proportions as dear friends and gentle people in our imaginations, but there are differences between us, after all, the biggest one being that we are out and you are in — I won’t go into the matter of which is better: there are disadvantages on both sides. But we are out in the picturesque cold. We don’t know what we’ll do. Best to you both, and please write.
Jim
JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL
Ard na Fairrge
Mount Salus
Dalkey, County Dublin
January 4, 1958
Dear Joe and Jody,
I must have a clock in my head like the Great Arcano, Master of Pace, for here it is Saturday night again and my thoughts turn toward you all, not that I haven’t thought of you from time to time in the last week … I wasn’t in the mood until tonight — and perhaps the mood is due to these little bottles of Mackeson’s stout that I am consuming against the morrow, which is Sunday, always a tough day for me, even without a sermon — I haven’t heard a sermon yet this time in Ireland, always drawing a curate, and they are, evidently, only trusted to read the announcements. Not a bad idea. It goes part of the way in the right direction. I don’t get those attacks of Sunday Sickness that I used to get. Now you understand why, in my nonviolent fashion, I have always opposed the vernacular. I did listen to Macmillan, the prime minister, earlier this evening, and so, you might say, I’ve had it — and in English at that — for this week.