We are all pretty much as you would have found us last week, all but me in bed, the radio going, an Italian station, Radio Moscow having closed down. Listening to RM is like getting KUOM for me: obviously extremely decent people announcing, a note of concern in their voices, as if to say, you poor bastard, but we’re for you, we’re giving you this good high-class fare, not without stimulating lectures and news coverage and folk songs. I haven’t listened to RM much this time but must try to remember where it comes in. I used to like to hear them bragging about their dam, when we were here the last time. I wonder whatever happened to that little old dam, the biggest little old best dam in the world. I suppose it’s Sputnik now. […]
Jim
DON AND MARY HUMPHREY
Ard na Fairrge
January 31, 1958
Dear Don and Mary,
[…] I do wish you could see something of the country; the furniture, silver, architecture, and what strikes me as the most impressive thing about Ireland: its stone walls, just everywhere you look, walls: man-hours that didn’t go up in smoke or pass away somehow but are still here to be seen, marching into each other and off into the country endlessly. I have thought many times of building a wall, and perhaps I am peculiarly sensitive to what’s involved; this vast achievement, much of it make-work in famine times, but a lot of it going right down into the sea and sound as if laid by God himself.
No word lately from any correspondent in the Movement. I would like to hear from someone of course, but I am not the mental case I was about it some weeks ago. Something died in me then. I look out at the cold, cold sea, and I realize it’s going to be that way from now on, cold, cold, for old JF whether it’s the sea or the land, Ireland or America. I had a bad accident last night. Half rising out of my easy chair to kill off a madrigal singer on the radio, I slipped somehow and came down on the side of the chair, the armrest (not well padded) injuring my ribs near my heart. Quite painful still, and I’m not as fast as I was at my tuning (the radio). But otherwise we are all more or less well — and you might say I was wounded in action. How about cutting loose with another letter, Mary? We enjoyed your last very much — and that goes for one and all in the Movement. How about a group picture?
Jim
Journal, February 13, 1958
Reading J. B. Morton’s Belloc and enjoying it. Must remember it when I begin next — family life — novel. For the high spirits — spirits, song, walks, people, conversation — which remind me how it was supposed to be when we got married … Hynes, if he ever really had this idea, confused it with the 4-H Club. But it needs handling in a book — and I think Flesh is the place for it. It will give the beginning — as a flashback — the foundation for contrast — that the book needs. And I want to do it. It gives me pleasure — sad pleasure — to think of it — this style we didn’t keep up and even forgot — at least I did until I read the book last night. My theory is that marriage kills it or it becomes something else*—that Belloc made it work because he had no wife later. That may be the secret of George’s success, too — at this.
21. The office is in Dublin, on Westland Row, February 26, 1958–July 23, 1958
Jane (Boz and Hugh in background), Greystones beach
Jim rented an office in Dublin, which improved his spirits, although not his ability to write much aside from letters. He spent his time away from home reading newspapers, studying racing forms, fixing up his office, wandering around Dublin, attending estate auctions, and ministering to his purchases: rubbing unguents into leather-bound books and cases, gluing furniture, and pursuing woodworm with a hypodermic needle primed with poison.
HARVEY EGAN
Ard na Fairrge
Mount Salus
Dalkey, County Dublin
February 26, 1958
Dear Fr Egan,
[…] I have put off replying to your last with the intention of writing my first letter from my new office to you, as I did last year about this time from my office in St Cloud. I have been in possession of the office since the 22nd of the month, but not established there because I haven’t been able to find the furniture. I sat through a whole auction unable to buy anything I wanted last Thursday. Today, however, I got the writing table — actually a dressing table — and a rug. I still lack a chair but hope to find one tomorrow in Dublin. I want a chair that I can rest in as well as work in: you might say that’s the story of my life as a writer. Tonight I attended a night auction in Dun Laoghaire and got no chair but something I wanted without seeing its purpose clearly. A writing box, so called; brass bound, about the size of an overnight bag, wood, with a desk-like surface in it that unfolds; thirty shillings; and engraved on a brass plate on the outside: “Major Talbot.” I have discovered that I take inordinate pleasure in auctions, even when I can’t afford to participate actively. I like to look at this old furniture; nothing, I think, shows better how far we’ve sunk in the last two or three hundred years.
The office is in Dublin, on Westland Row, a few doors from where Oscar Wilde was born in 1854, a business district now, near the railroad station that serves the line that runs through Dalkey. I am on the top floor, back, with one window looking out in the direction of Trinity College; the top floor being the fourth and quite a climb. The previous tenant, a manufacturer’s agent by the name of MacEgan, has a partner by the name of Egan, and they have moved down to the ground floor (just too much for them, the climb with their sample cases). The rent: £5 a month. This is about a third less than the going rate, and I am there with the understanding that I vacate if a proper tenant is found. I think this unlikely, with times so hard here. It’s aesthetically the Dublin equivalent of my St Cloud hole. I have done practically nothing since coming to Ireland. The chips will be down from now on — or else.
We met Padraic Colum at Sean O’Faolain’s house last Sunday night; a nice old gentleman. He (with his late wife) has a book coming out this spring, from Doubleday: Our Friend James Joyce. He said that Doubleday had wanted him to change the title because some of the salesmen thought it was likely to be confusing to booksellers — too close to My Friend Flicka. He didn’t tell this as a joke. He is not changing the title, though. “A very popular book,” he said, referring to Flicka, “about a dog, I believe.” “A horse,” I said, not having read it and still overwhelmed by the suggestion that he change the title for that reason. “A pony,” Sean said. One card, Father?
Since I last wrote, our Abp1 has been in the news. He nixed the votive Mass to open the Spring Festival (An Tostal, in Irish) because of two plays, one based on Ulysses, the other a new one by Sean O’Casey; Beckett, the dramatist famous for Waiting for Godot, then withdrew his contributions to the festival; and finally the whole thing — the drama part — was canceled. Plenty of people wrote to The Irish Times, including Kate O’Brien and Colum, but apparently the shooting is over; the odor lingers but is nothing new, I guess. The Abp, in theory, is in the clear. The trouble all began when some pious trade unionists petitioned for the Mass. The moraclass="underline" never ask if you can’t take no for an answer.