A Writer in Search of Himself

IF I know now that I had always been a writer, it is not because of my early, boyish efforts (every child wants to write or draw), or because of my persistence (every writer has met scores of people in their forties and fifties who still “want to write”). I know it because I have become a writer. Of what quality is another matter, something that not even I know, perhaps I least of all. In these matters there is only one judge who does not lie, Father Time, and he wobbles a long time before he makes up his mind. Everybody who has lived to be sixty must know this, having in his span seen too many men and women reach an apparently unassailable peak which they were presently forced to yield, line by line, to their successors and later critics. Few of us can be quite so certain today as we were yesterday about Galsworthy and Bennett, Gide and Rolland, Gerhart Hauptmann and Shaw, even about eminent writers still living, such as Somerset Maugham or John Steinbeck. By a coincidence, it has just happened that while retyping these words in the winter of 1963 I have come on two topical reconsiderations of two of those writers. I will quote just two sentences from a review by Richard Mayne in the New Statesman of the paperback reissues of four books by Mr. Maugham, including Of Human Bondage:

“The habit of talking like a Dutch uncle to some imaginary middle-brow reader is crippling for a serious novelist. . . . The writing is far more uncertain than in most of Mr. Maugham’s later work - more cliché-ridden, lusher, sometimes sentimental, and occasionally even inarticulate.”

In the same paper a long essay on John Galsworthy by V. S. Pritchett opens:

“Galsworthy’s imagination was lukewarm: thin, partial, thumbnail sketches of people, poor invention, jogtrot realism, blur when there was a question of feeling, embarrassment or jauntiness when there should be thought.”

This about a Nobel Prize winner and an O. M., who refused a knighthood. Such later reconsiderations of writers whom we once admired are chastening. They warn us that when we attach the word “artist” to any living man or woman, our certainty about what we mean is as limited as when we meet a doctor or a priest - we acknowledge a vocation, a title, a claim. This is all I mean in general by saying that I know now that I had always been a writer.

But I also mean something specific by the word “writer.” Every writer is a man with one deaf ear and one blind eye who is possessed by a demon and unteachable by anybody but himself; a man who only half hears and half sees the world about him because for half his time he is absorbedly listening at the keyhole to his own Demon, examining with fascination his primordial Shadow. From this inner absorption comes his ruthlessncss; his egoism; his readiness to make use of anybody, even his dearest and nearest, to serve his pen; his insistence on reshaping everything that he thus half sees and half hears in accord with his inner self; and his endless curiosity mingled now with sympathy, now with an almost blind hatred for other writers, who are, meantime, also eavesdropping on their own Demons and Shadows.

I do not, however, believe at all that writers are blind masses of subjectivity. On the contrary, I believe that most writers have much more in common with the scientific mind than we realize. Just as every scientist seeks for the inherent order of life in some small corner of nature, surely the artist who wants to understand his whole experience as a man will seek also for an intelligent hypothesis to “explain” his small corner of human life. Hardy — Dorset and the President of the Immortals; Jane Austen — Hampshire and Good Intentions; Mauriac — Bordeaux and Greed. Where scientist and artist radically differ is in the nature of their material, not of their pursuits. We can classify crystals. We cannot classify the endless variety of the human psyche. But the pursuit of each seems to me to come from a similar intellectual desire to find order in the seeming chaos of Life.

I have to except, of course, from this intellectual pursuit those writers who are mainly excited by what one may call the Donnybrook Fair side of life, writers who choose disorder as a theme, or the tumult of their own beings, which comes to the same thing. These one might call our Dionysiacs or anarchists. I do not deny their interest. They are unarguably a minority, though very common today in the whole run of letters. Yet, even including these Dionysiacs, I suggest it is a true image of both scientists and writers to see them all as a scattered procession of explorers, small as ants as compared to the world, each climbing his grass-blade to view the universe, uttering triumphant cries now called a poem, now a scientific fact, one here, one there, until the world we know gets mapped and remapped, over and over; that is to say, gets invented again and again in every generation: made up, as Isidor Rabi put it, much more forcibly than I dare to. when he said: “The universe is not given to us in the form of a map or a guide. It is made up by human minds and imaginations out of slight hints which come from acute observations and the profound stratagems of experiments.”

The image of the artist holding a mirror up to nature leaves out of account his transformation, by selection and invention, of the otherwise meaningless jungle of actuality. His good eye, his good ear, demon-guided, decide fastidiously, intellectually, and imaginatively what, alone among all the eyes and ears ol the world, he shall see and hear in the green wilderness. What saves him from the banality of seeing and hearing what everybody else has always seen and heard is his God-given infirmities. They bestow on him his own obstinate vision, which is his Self in action, making these new shapes of life.

I THINK I have always been a romantic with a hopeless longing for classical order. A critic of my first book of stories described me as a romantic caught in the despotism of fact. It is not the same thing, but it is close to it insofar as one way of taming the despotic fact is to subject it to form. When I look at my earliest stories that were of my own world and not of the world rented to me by my begetters, this is what at once strikes and delights me.

To illustrate I must make a large descent to my very first story that is recognizably mine: the little thing, not much more than a sketch, which AE published in the Irish Statesman in February, 1926, and which I called “Lilliput.” I wrote it as a marginal footnote to the Troubles. I had looked out of my window in Half Moon Street one evening before the curfew and seen a rude caravan made of canvas fastened over hoops on the base of a common cart, belonging, it appeared, to a tinker woman with two or three small children. While the rest of Cork cowered indoors from the bullets of the Black and Tans, here was this fearless wanderer from the country pitching her tent in an open street — even if it was an unfrequented side street. The incident was striking, but an incident is of itself the least part of any work of art, however modest; what counts is the light one lets fall on it to pick out the thing in it, or the things in it, that make the whole incident significant for one’s Demon. What was I to do with my little incident to bring out what it meant to me? I felt it as a myth, and to assert the myth gave it its title. Here was a female Gulliver among us pygmies, a wonder to our simple citizens, a creature from the wild world, a tiny scrap of my private myth of the west of Ireland as the Free Country, one of those minor goddesses who float down among common men in Homer to comfort or awe them. I then let my mind fall on one or two little incidents: the local priest, awed and ineffectual before this intruding pagan (pagana: of the country); a kind citizen bringing to the stranger his modest libations; the soldiery passing the tiny temple with respect: and the outer shape or form of night, day, night. The little story is of no weight, a brief idyll. I dally with it only because it was my first tiny success, yet it already showed how through form or order I was liberated into myself, to good effect.

And now let me give a real example of imaginative form, the second leaf of the companion piece on springtime in Thomas Hardy’s diptych-poem “Weathers.” If we read it casually, it may seem just a nice little poem; read attentively, it becomes a superb lyric.

There is the counterpart of the scientist’s enchanted discovery of the constituents of nature, the poet’s discovery of the constituents of enchanted nature; the first stressing his intelligence while also using his imagination, the second stressing his imagination while also using his intelligence. Hardy was probably the most accurate, minute, and loving observer of nature among all English poets, their most realistic-imaginative poet this side of Shakespeare. When he said shepherds he did mean literary shepherds. He knew them all by name. His Saxon “duns" is not just an easy rhyme; it is chosen to evoke the precise cinnamon-brown of the beech mast. For the full development of the accurate “thresh, and ply” we may go to his woodsman’s scientific description of how various trees act in storm in The Woodlanders. Anybody who has been in Dorsetshire and stood on Egdon Heath will recognize at once that far throbbing of the sea hidden beyond the hills, and the appositeness and suggestiveness of the heavy Saxon word for the tide’s death, “throe.” Our eyes, like his eyes, fall on the drowned meadow and the drops on the gate bars with the same delight of recognition. We will finally realize that this is a poem not only about natural weather but also about the autumn of the heart only when he rounds off the moment with a characteristic philosophical sigh in “And so do I”; and the small man standing, collar up, on a wet heath in October turns sadly away, out of himself, out of nature, back to what is not really for him, as it is for the rooks, home.

It may have been thought that I was praising myself by saying kind words just now about that youthful sketch. In fact, I do not feel that any writer deserves credit for anything he does apart from the credit due to his patience, persistence, and honesty. When a writer writes something, the whole man does not move: a select part of him is moved by his Demon, his essential being, his talent, a thing bestowed on him by the gods as a bonus, like beauty in a woman. It may be the larger part of him, like the submerged part of the iceberg; but how can one talk of larger or smaller in such matters? Of this only can we be certain, that his essential being is not the worldly or public part of the artist, as those words are commonly understood —■ a necessary distinction, since the artist must also as an artist mingle with the things of the world, observe them, be delighted with them or horrified by them, know them well, feel them intensely, before he drags them with him into his submerged factory. When he is not in his submarine factory, when he is not Proteus, he is, in the commonly accepted sense, a worldly and public man. and so, and therefore, not an artist for that time being, however long or brief the respite may be from his vocation and his Demon. In those short or long periods of respite lie may be photographed, interviewed, praised, asked to sign books, given prizes, introduced to the public at large as “Mr. X, the distinguished writer,” and may even—if he is fool enough — bask in it all. But lie is not there as an artist. Only his shell is there, being photographed or praised; and this shell never wrote a word or painted a stroke. I praise then, and praise only, my private creature, whom I do not myself know very well, whom I am in these pages trying, for the lirst time, to photograph as a scientist might try to photograph the molecular construction of an apparently solid object.

I have to add that the essential being of the creative individual, his pure personality, is, no doubt, released at times other than when he is about his vocation. That essential being may also be released in love, with his children, when he is stirred by music or by wine, by memories, by good talk. When he is not released, his head droops in the stable: a quiet-looking brute, you would not even notice the folded wings. How many, meeting Thomas Hardy in a railroad train, would have thought him a poet?

AND now, what is all this about, autobiographically speaking? It is about one morning early in 1926 when a fateful incident brought it all clearly before my consciousness.

I stopped in the main corridor of the college to read the official notices pinned up among the ogham stones and the old stone querns that line the stone-flagged hallway. At that instant my line of fate was crossed by a man named Stephen Harkness, an American who once loaned a poor man named Rockefeller one thousand dollars for some scheme concerning the sale of oil, as a result of which both became in the course of time very rich indeed. In 1926 bis son Edward was also a very rich man. He was an Ohioan who had been educated at Saint Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and at Yale; was director of the Southern Pacific and the New York Central railroads, a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and of the Presbyterian Hospital, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, and a member of seven New York clubs. He was just twice iny age that January morning in 1926 as I read on the notice board that the Commonwealth Fund (later known as the Harkness Fund) was offering traveling fellowships to suitable candidates who wished to do postgraduate work in the United States.

Whether through ignorance or arrogance, or both, I was not much interested in this idea of studying in the United States. At that time very few people were. Nevertheless, on an idle impulse I went into the president’s office for further information, was given an application form and mildly encouraged to “have a shot at it.” I filled in the form. I found that I also needed some written recommendations from people who knew me. That Christmas I had been in Dublin and met AE and Lennox Robinson, so I ventured to ask them if they would be so kind as to sponsor me. They very generously did, and I have no doubt that it was solely thanks to their recommendation that I was asked to come to London for an interview. In due course, I was informed that I had been granted a fellowship valuable enough to permit me to spend two years, studying freely, in any American university which the foundation approved and to travel around the United States, in comfort, for three months.

When Whistler published his The Gentle Art of Making Enemies he brightened the margins with little mocking signatures, his famous butterflies. As my narrative gradually progresses from inscience to awareness, I have been tempted to drop on my margins from time to time a drawing of a pealing bell, my warning bell. “Here it comes!” my little bell would say, another one of those welling-up moments whose importance I failed at the time to recognize. There might well be one of those clanging bells in my margin at this point.

When I opened and read the letter informing me that I was now a Commonwealth Fellow, I read it in total indifference. I told nobody about it for several days. The first person I told was the president’s secretary, a young woman whom I very much liked and admired, and her, only because I met her by chance in the street and because she asked me eagerly if I had had any news about my application for the fellowship.

“Oh, yes!” I said, with the air of somebody recollecting a matter of small importance. “I got that thing.”

Delighted at my good fortune, she clapped her hands and cried, “Isn’t that absolutely marvelous? You must be feeling on top of the world!”

When I said that I supposed it was all right, it was better than nothing anyway, she went pale with fury, turned on her heel, and walked away from me, saying over her shoulder, “You are impossible!”

At that word “impossible” I was brought face to face with the conflict in myself that I had not hitherto suspected: between the intellect and the imagination; a falsely based conflict, as I was in time to discover.

I did not think that I was being impossible. I thought I was merely in doubt. It was because I was in doubt that I had spoken to nobody about it. I felt, or feared, that with this fellowship the outer, public world, counseling study, advancement, policy, professional success, was pushing aside my inner, secret world where I wanted to live in seclusion and write, or, as I put it, to be Myself. Considering this fellowship, I felt a little like the young Joyce when he was offered by his Jesuit teachers a post in what is now University College, Dublin. I respected scholarship, especially ever since my disillusion with the romantic and woolly thinking I had met in Irish politics had begun to lead me to admire passionately every man who could think clearly, coldly, and factually. But the idea of devoting my whole life to factual thinking was another matter.

I squirm a little now at my callowness. It was not only the job that Joyce had disliked. It was also the place. Here was I, offered escape, the challenges, trials, and bright temptations of a vast, various, and different world, experiences unforeseeable, disciplines of the mind that I badly needed; and to all this I was opposing the image of the artist curled within his pearly chambered nautilus — the only cephalopod, by the way, that cannot squirt ink.

How could I have been, I now ask myself, so romantic, still? So unawakened?

If I was then, for all my twenty-six years, less frank-eyed about myself and the world around me than any boy ten years my junior in the streets of Chicago or New York, I think the reasons are to be found all the way back to my childhood. I was born gentle, soft, and passionate, and though I was eager and full of curiosity and had taken part in a political upheaval, I lived too much inside myself. Perhaps the chambered nautilus is not such a bad image, after all, for that side of my nature.

A timid cephalopod, leaving behind him his pretty house on the coral beaches of Nicobar, or where I was often to admire him later, in the dusty windows of little shops on Third Avenue much frequented by connoisseurs of conchology. Still, Nautilus pompilius has one virtue to which Oliver Wendell Holmes did not pay tribute. My encyclopedia informs me that he makes fairly rapid progress along the sea bottoms, propelled by his foot. I did, after all, advance, however cautiously, on the United States of America.

If, then, I was being “impossible” about the fellowship, it was not because I was being cowardly or oversoft, or because I craved privacy and autonomy as a would-be writer and feared the limiting implications of scholarship as another kind of consortium. But because my double-sided nature was equally drawn to the world of the private sensibilities and to the world of the collective intelligence, I did not yet know how to blend them both, and oversimplified by thinking I must make a clear-cut choice between them.

This conflict, false or real, is not a specifically Irish problem — it is a universal problem and as old as Adam — but it does manifest itself very clearly and painfully in Ireland and the Irish tradition. It is, I know, unscholarly to speak of the Celts in this context, but I am nevertheless going to do so, because I can say about them what I dare not say about my countrymen: that they were splendid barbarians, free-riding on the northern borders of the Roman Empire, proud and fearless as Arabs (they often fought stark-naked), sociable and hospitable men, great lovers of their wild liberty, indeed wholly admirable except for their one fatal weakness, that they never truly consorted — that is, never made a state being unable to develop the moral sense I speak of, and so were picked off tribe by tribe by the armies of tlie moral Empire. In Ireland well into the seventeenth century we were still free-riding fern-men who likewise would not form a firm union. We too were, as a result, broken and reduced to helots. I had, thus, no image of effective liberty within the traditions of my own people, and when I looked beyond them to the forms of liberty of the great consortium nearest to hand, I both admired and suspected them.

Had I gained a fellowship to some English university, I might there also have come into direct contact with a new world conscious of the importance of an intellectual elite, willing to give to all its individuals, irrespective of their class, every possible facility. As it happened, I was to meet that spirit in America, the only classless, egalitarian democracy history has ever known, infinitely daring, almost recklessly inventive, garnering the brains of the world to complete the humanist and scientific ambitions of the past. There I was to begin — if only to begin - to realize that the intellect and the imagination are a single co-penetrative force. After that there was to be no further question of having to choose between two forms of creative freedom.

Perversely, Cork became more attractive to me according as the time for my departure from it approached, so that whenever I hear on the wind, nowadays, a church bell in the evening, the fragile memory it evokes, the sense of something lost forever, goes back as swift as lightning to this city of my birth at the point in time where I was, without knowing it, about to leave it forever. We must all in our house have had some third sense not merely of departure but final departure, for my father and mother now, at the last moment, evoked from me an affection that I had not given them since childhood, and on their side poured affection over me lavishly, largely no doubt because, for the first time, they had, or thought they had, reason to feel proud of me. My father kept coming to me every second day with some fresh testimony from somebody he had met to my ability, or my cleverness, hitherto unsuspected but now made apparent in this donation of a valuable fellowship. I was happy that he got so much pleasure in the end out of me who had given him so little in the beginning. My mother took an equal delight in gradually filling my brand-new cabin trunk with my brand-new trousseau, which I had the small wit to make as complicated — that is, as interesting — for her as possible.

I had bought a book on etiquette and had discovered, for instance, that the ideal shirt for tennis should be fastened between the legs to keep it from riding up and bulging out in an ungraceful fashion in the heat of the game. There was also, for some reason now lost to me, a mention of black silk shirts. Her search for these, and her explanations for their urgent necessity in Every Gentleman’s Complete Outfit, must have spread my fame as an oddball in all the drapers’ shops in town. (She did not succeed in buying a black silk shirt.) I sent her off after visiting cards, dress shirts with Amcrican-style collars attached, a special and hitherto unheard-of kind of expanding cuff link, patent-leather pumps, silk under-trunks, riding gloves with cord-woven palms, white woolen socks for squash, Ascot-type cravats for wearing with my dressing gown at breakfast. She was both shocked and enchanted by my needs.

I did not dare to ask her to inquire after an opera hat, collapsible. I did ask one hatter, pretending I wanted it for a fancy-dress party. He said, “I know what you mean, but I don’t stock ‘em, and if I did dere isn’t anyone in dis city would know what dey’re for.”I may add that in due course I did play tennis and squash, learned to ride, rowed sculls on the Charles, and went in tails to the theater, the symphony and opera, though not, alas, in a tall hat (collapsible), to see — how old it makes me feel! — Ruth St. Denis dance and Duse act, and to hear Chaliapin sing.

I think my father touched the peak of his pride in me the day I told him, rather sheepishly, that I had been summoned to London, with all the other Fellows, to be presented in Saint James’s Palace to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, later Ring Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, at the time the Patron of the Commonwealth Fund. Over and over, on my return, I had to tell him about Saint James’s, about the equerries, about H.R.H. (“The grandson,” he said in sad recall, “of King Edward VII, whose head is on my constabulary medal!”).

There was only one detail that I suppressed, the dry, this-may-take-you-down-a-peg comment of one of the equerries that just before we scholars arrived, the Master Bakers of Nottingham had been presented to H.R.H., bearing — on their shoulders? — a six-foot-high cake. “Damn nuisance some of these gifts! The cellars are full of boars’ heads, elephant tusks, lions’ hides, frightful oil paintings from the four corners of the world, and we have to keep every one of ‘em. Never know when the damn fool who gave them may turn up again and inquire after his tusk or his hide.” I did retail how cross the Queen Mother was the day she spotted this same young equerry’s tennis shoes, freshly pipe-cleaned, drying on a windowsill of the palace. “My batman took the blame. Sacked ! I got him another job, of course. But is she a Tartar!”

My father thoroughly approved of the Tartar.

“ Take note of it,” he said. “If you are ever asked to stay in a rich house, never put your boots on the windowsill. That’s the spirit that made the Empire!" He looked at me sharply. “You didn’t say anything, I hope?”

It was unkind of me; but we had been over this ground half a dozen times, arid I was bored with it, so I said, “Well, he did ask me what I had been doing before I got the fellowship.”

“What did you say?” he asked anxiously.

“I said I had been in the Irish Army.” I waited for him to blench. “I didn’t say which army. And he had no time to ask, because then it was my turn to walk up the twenty-five yards of red carpet to the Prince standing at the end of it.”

“You foolish boy!” he moaned. “You might have lost the fellowship!”

“Why? After all, there is such a thing as the Irish Army.”

“ The Irish — ? Oh, that!” and he walked off in disgust at the idea of a Fellow who had been out with the I.R.A. being presented to the grandson of H.M. Edward VII.

THAT day at Saint James’s Palace was the first time I mingled with my counterparts, and the last time I met them on their home ground. The experience was both disturbing and exhilarating. Those twenty-odd Fellows, from universities all over Britain I was the only Irishman depressed me at first for a reason that I could not have foreseen. Their poise, their polish, their techniques, their name-dropping, their social probes into one another’s background, their skill at what might nowadays be called Upmanship, even their real or pretended maturity, I could take for granted. We all had read of, met, or observed enough Britishtrained Anglo-Irish to recognize an old and rather boring pattern. What I did find disturbing was their cool way of regarding the fellowship purely as a financial subsidy for continuing their private studies for two years, with, as they considered, the regrettable proviso that these studies must be pursued in America. I heir eyes were so firmly fixed on the home groove that to them this two-year trip to the United States was, apart from the financial subsidy, a cul-de-sac. They had no wish to escape; quite the contrary. They did not anticipate any experiences in the United States that they could not overmatch in Britain or on the Continent. What troubled me was not that this was part of the effortless superiority of a master race looking down at America; it wasn’t—it was the normal attitude of all young Britishers of their class at that date, contentedly aware that there was adequate opportunity for them at home, making straight and hard for their fixed goals.

Listening to them bandying all those names of colleges, tutors, professors, posts in the universities, industry, banking, even the Church, prophesying where Tom would go or recording where Bill had already got to, their minds moving smoothly over a network of opportunity, I thought back to Ballinasloe, and Ennis, and to my one and only, and extremely doubtful, groove in University College, Cork, and it came as a shock to me that by comparison Ireland could offer to men like me at most only an isolated opportunity here, and another there, many miles and many years apart. But after this first painful shock of revelation I began to get an exhilarating feeling, quite effortlessly I may say, and all my own, from the thought that if I was not grooved I was different, I was out on my own, I was challenging life in a way that they had never known and never would know.

One of them probed me delicately about my school. I told him all about my grim-happy Lancasterian National School in Cork, its battered desks, its crowded rooms and malodorous jakes. my barefooted companions, Sloppy Dan with his swinging leather, the glass falling from the clerestory when the ball game was being played with tightly rolled-up balls of paper in the gravelly yard outside. He then probed about my college, and I enlarged eloquently on old Professor Stockley, “ The only living professor of English who can write sentences without verbs”; on Feathery Ellen, the professor of education who banned Joyce’s Portrait; on my professor of Old Irish, a poet and a charming little man, who used to write the Sanskrit roots on the blackboard from cards in his hand because he knew no philology, no Sanskrit, and very little Old Irish. As I talked others gathered around me. Gradually they all fell silent, their mouths as hangjawed as pelicans’. When, finally, I told them I had been with the I.R.A. for several years, they stared at me at first in disbelief, then in confusion, admiration, liking, and at last. I believed, in plain envy. It was as if behind an old school tie and the mild exterior of, at least, another future don, they had suddenly discovered Mr. Brendan Behan.

As we rose to leave I said: “See you fellows in America! If you ever get into trouble there ring me up. I have an uncle who is chief of police in Chicago and a cousin who is the best ward boss in Boston.”

I never did that again. It was too easy and (with all respect and affection for my friends who do it) too near to the stage Irishman. And funny poses do not cut fine grooves.

In turn, those Fellows aroused envy in me when I found that they had all been traveling in Europe in their summer teens while I had been sitting under dripping hedges in West Cork, talking Irish to old men with mouths full of bad teeth and minds full ol primordial memories. One Fellow had been as far as Istanbul; another talked glowingly of Zagreb; another, an architect, had pursued Byzantium from Venice to Thessaly; while I had not even touched the shores of Europe, and the only foreign language I had heard spoken by a native was English. In America, I now knew, I could make up for lost time in other ways: scholarship, sport, the arts, the Full Life.

Before I went there I decided that I must make some gesture toward this one large gap in my experience. On my return to Cork from London I tried to make up a little travel party. It came down in the end to Eileen, the girl I hoped to marry, Frank O’Connor, and myself, and we almost did just touch the shores of Europe. We went to Bruges.

We stayed in a little inn called, in Flemish, the Flemish Lion, at Damme, a hamlet about four miles up the canal to the sea. One of the charms of Bruges, as of Ravenna or of Aiguesmortes, is that it has been, in the literal sense, left behind by the tide - so far that the site of the famous offshore naval Battle of Sluys, where the English beat the French in 1340, is today green grass beside this canal that now joins Bruges to the sea. There for a week we swam as deep as skin divers in our first pool of foreignness, feeling everything, seeing nothing, far too mesmerized by the strangeness of this sensual experience for so cool and clear a sense as sight. O’Connor was not there an hour before he revealed, in his usual spontaneous way, his own secret image of the Full Life. He bought an enormousbrimmed black poet’s hat — to my intense envy, because once he had done so I could not do it, any more than a lady can buy a frock identical to one she has envied on another. He put it on, sat in an outdoor café, and sank into a blissful coma of narcissism, immobile as a waxwork the livelong day. We saw so little of him in Bruges that I should not be surprised if he spent his entire holiday immobile in that café. It was not such a bad way to spend a holiday. How often In later years have I not spent days and days in Rome or Paris — once I had got the monuments and museums off my conscience—just sitting in a café in a boulevard, or a piazza, or on the Via Veneto, watching the passing crowds, or lying on the brushed and combed sands of the Lido, gazing for hours at the blue of the sea or the sky.

Otherwise, we cycled into the adjoining piece of Zeeland formed by the estuary of the Schelde, in order to be able at least to say that we had been in Holland, or out to the long beaches of the popular Belgian resorts around Blankerberghc and Heyst. As dazed as a boy after his lirst kiss, I brought away from Bruges itself only a few startled visions: the great belfry when the chimes rang out, the silence of the Quai de Rosa ire, the tomb of Charles the Bold, a few anonymous Gothic outlines kissed by the early morning or by the late moon.

EILEEN and I then counted up our few remaining pounds and shillings and declared that we must go to Paris, even if only for a few days. O’Connor either could not afford it or did not wish to come, so we set off alone, indifferent to such unimportant things as comfort and meals, for our first smell of Paris as unforgettable as the scent of old cottage roses, verbena after rain, or apples in hay - of the Bois at night, the deep Seine, the subways, cheap state-monopoly tobacco, and that happily inimitable smell of French water closets, largely eau de Javelle and garlic, that makes them as indigenous a part of the French tradition as Pascal or Voltaire. We wandered, as happy as only first-run tourists can be, hand in hand around the quays, the island, the old city; saw our first play at the Comedic Française; took our first vast, intoxicated, undifferentiating, overgorged gulp of the seemingly endless Louvre; though for me, who had read every novel I could find about the Revolution, the most impressive building in Paris — and I think it may be this for anybody—was the Conciergerie, in whose cold stones all the coldness of the Terror still lives as if preserved on ice forever. That alone made Paris worth every discomfort.

Social manners have become much more relaxed since those days even of the expansive twenties. I was in my twenty-sixth year, ardent and romantic. Eileen, with her high coloring, brown eyes, and black hair, was like a rose with the sultry yet brilliant effect of a dark-red rhododendron. Anybody hearing that such a young man had gone to Paris alone with such a girl would then have raised at least an inquiring eyebrow; today, perhaps, add an indulgent smile. I must admit that if today I had a son or daughter wandering in Paris in like circumstances my eyebrows might shoot up under my hair at once — until I bethought myself of myself at that time. We were as innocent as the morning star that Lampedusa so exquisitely describes in Il Gattopardo as “hanging like a peeled grape” in the dawn sky over the dews of Sicily. Our days were as candid, in the true and original sense of that gleaming word. It sometimes amuses me now to remember that the Left Bank was then full of Americans in temporary exile whooping it up in ways often far from candid, in any sense of the word; to wonder what on earth they would have thought of us two the night we went to the Grand Guignol. There Eileen became so terrified — how wonderful to be able to be terrified by a makebelieve!— that she said, as we trudged home at midnight (no money for taxis, and we would not have wasted a sou on a bus, supposing we had known what bus to take), “I know I won’t sleep tonight; will you sleep with me?”, which, we both knew, meant that I might in all candor lie by her to comfort her. When we got back to our obscure hotel we agreed that if she were troubled during the night by red visions of blood and knives and old women screaming in madhouses, she would knock at the wall of our adjoining rooms, and I would come in to her for a while. If, now, I have any of those momentary doubts about young people going off alone, I have only to remind myself of those blissful, disembodied days spent wandering in wonderment through Paris long after the morning star became the evening star to bcjewel the pink-dark sky of the City of Cities.

Such was the youth — turned twenty-six, but surely still a youth — who pushed off late one night that September in the tender chugging out from Cobh to a liner anchored far out in the bay under a full moon. Its long lines of portholes were bright. White specks of seagulls swung over its masts. As we approached it we began to hear the ship’s band that had come out on deck to welcome us. Two girls on the tender by me melted into a soft weeping at the tune floating across the still water. It was “Come Back to Erin.” They would never see Ireland again. My own feelings as I heard it gave me a shock. I found that I was hearing it with a savage pleasure at its ineptitude, all my latent disillusion with Ireland, with life in general, welling up in a sudden, bitter satisfaction at yet another instance of human stupidity.

A young friend, who had not shared as deeply as I had in the bright dream or the sad disillusion of the Troubles, had come out on the tender with me. He said, “I hope, Sean, you won’t be too homesick in the States.”

“For Ireland?” I asked bitterly. “I don’t care if I never see the bloody place again.”

He was shocked. “How can you say such a thing?” he cried. “Look at how lovely it is, especially now, in this moon. Look at the hills, look at the bay, you’ll be dreaming of them, man! You’ll be weeping tears of blood to get back to them.”

“Nonsense!” I laughed. “What is Ireland but a country of grasping peasants? Yeats is right. ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, ‘tis with O’Leary in the grave.’ And ‘Paudeen grubbing for his greasy pence.’ No, son! It’s finished for me. Forever!”

I thought of him more than once in the year that followed when I would lie awake at night thinking of that moon-white bay.

IN Cambridge, I took lodgings at Number 48 Irving Street, a quiet, dusty, undistinguished suburban side street wholly devoted to students’ lodging houses, as was plain to be seen every night by the number of green-shaded reading lamps staining the dusk of every window; every morning by the number of milk bottles deposited with a diffident jingle on every porch; and every Saturday and Sunday morning by the line of exhausted-looking jalopies waiting along the sidewalks.

Two other Commonwealth Fellows joined me at Number 48. One was a lean, bouncy Scottish physicist named George Bull, an ex-army man, a born mixer, and a splendid cusser in broad Scots, who always walked as if he were swinging along in a kilt to the nearest pub. Bull liked his beer, so his encounters with Prohibition used up a lot of his cussing power. He was a keen amateur violinist, so we naturally called him Ole Bull. The other man was Frank Chambers, a handsome, dark, indolenteyed architect, as big and slow as a black bear, though not quite as formidable: he was a very gentle creature. He later gave up architecture for political history, is now Senior Lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is probably best known for his book This Age of Conflict, a study of the political and military history of the West from 1914 to the present day. These two were somewhat older than I, both serious-minded students, and although Ole Bull had his occasional outbursts of Celtic, revolt, it is honest recording to say that the three of us lived at Number 48 like three monks boarded out from Harvard Abbey. Each had his one room, his narrow bed, his one armchair, his pinewood office desk, his chest of drawers (called “bureau” in American), and on his bureau — as, I suppose, on every bureau within a square mile of Harvard Yard — his one, unmonkish icon: his smiling girl waiting for him back at home.

Within days my routine was in accord with my simple lodgings. The first thing I bought was an alarm clock, then a teapot, one cup. saucer, plate, spoon, knife, and fork, tea towels, and paper napkins from the five-and-ten, to make breakfast and afternoon tea and, if I had no lectures, or if it was snowing badly, a snack lunch. Every morning, including Sundays, my clock buzzed me awake at seven. After breakfast I worked until nine, went to my tiny carrel in Widener Library, or to a lecture, and I was back again in my cage in Widener until dinner time. Each day I squeezed in a fast bout of exercise. I tried rowing on the Charles but found that it took too long. I tried swimming but found that it was not strenuous enough. In the end I found that I could lose the most sweat in the shortest time on the squash courts. After dinner, mostly in some steamy, noisy, students’ cafeteria — we all loathed these places but could not afford better — I either went back once more to Widener or returned home to Number 48, there to add my green lamp to the thousands of other green lamps all about me, many of them burning, like green eyes, into the small hours of the morning.

I fell completely in love with this ascetic life, for a rather crass reason. It gave me the feeling that I was sharing in Harvard’s special and perhaps unique reflection of the New England Puritan tradition — high-minded and self-denying, leanlimbed and stout-hearted, privileged yet responsible, hierarchical and leisured, sometimes boringly jaunty but always chock-full of character, never vulgar, often fastidious, and if Harvard was not exactly a liberal institution (I cannot imagine any university in America being called, like Oxford, the Home of Lost Causes), it was not bigoted, or mean, or parochial, or shut-minded. I felt I was imbibing the finest wine of old Boston’s mandarinism as I had been induced to imagine it by such men as Emerson and Thoreau and William Dean Howells, but especially by those three great Harvardians, Henry Adams, William and Henry James.

This pleasant illusion faded only when I discovered that what I was really admiring in Harvard was not Boston but Berlin. I could not have known that all over America, from coast to coast, other students of the humanities were living very similar lives under the same Germanic academic influence: devotedly earnest, pedantically specialized, fanatically rationalist, emotionally arid, fundamentally anti-aesthetic. But I could have seen, and did gradually come to see, that literature in Harvard at the graduate level meant chiefly philology; as all over America it now means critical analysis. I know no Harvard professor of the twenties, except Irving Babbitt, who realized that plays, poetry, or novels had ever been written at a higher temperature than an icebox. If I am right in this, it is not surprising that the book which then presented the ideal approach to literature was John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu, an exotic piece of scholarly bravura where every line of “Khubla Khan” is traced to its source and all the wild wonder of the poem annihilated. (“Our most accomplished sleuth,” Babbitt called Lowes.) Perhaps I came at a bad time: too late for Santayana, Whitey and Foster Damon, too soon for F. O. Matthiessen and Theodore Spencer (both in the graduate school with me in ‘26), for Harry Levin, Kenneth Murdock, and Archibald MacLeish — and Alfred North Whitehead was not teaching while I was there — too soon, above all, to escape the powerful and, I now feel, baleful influence of that devouring old lion of the humanities in Harvard for some forty years, George Lyman Kittredge.

Like everybody else who sat under him, I never failed to be entranced by Kitty’s lucid brain, and depressed to find him invariably remote from his students, to whom he always gave the impression that he regarded everybody under fifty as little better than a schoolboy. I do not doubt that among his colleagues he must often have expanded; I never once saw him do so in class, and as well as attending all his lectures in the Beowulf course — which were of a deadly dullness — I dropped as often as I could into his other classes simply for the joy of seeing that lovely brain and that faultless memory working as smoothly as a precision instrument.

I have often, since then, heard it proposed that the reason why Kittredge and his colleagues persisted in the grim Ph.D. regime that they imposed on their students — it meant at least two grueling years of linguistic or philological studies, and one, two, or more years on a thesis of the most pedantically Concentrated nature — was not only because they had been trained that way themselves in Berlin, or Munich, or Heidelberg, but because they felt that very few, if any, of their students had enough background or brains to be anything but useful language teachers. If there ever was any validity in this idea it could, surely, refer only to the sort of pioneer or backwoods America which they had known in their boyhood. Certainly, by the twenties, when Kitty’s patriarchal beard and leonine mane were white as snow, this argument of despair was fast losing any such validity as it may ever have had. It was nothing but blind militarism to have subjected men like Matthiessen, or Spencer, or Ernest Simmons to this (for them, pointless) discipline: men who were cut out to be, and proved themselves to be, perceptive and inspiring literary critics as well as sound scholars.

Over the years I have canvassed the opinions of others who knew Kittredge. The general feeling is that his mind was assimilative rather than original: he had, that is, amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of a certain orthodox combination of subjects, and never forgotten one jot of it. All pay tribute to his domineering personality. He built up what Babbitt called the Philological Syndicate in Harvard, which he was also able to control indirectly in other universities throughout the United States. On the verbal precision of his mind everybody is admiringly agreed; as most are about his behavior as a crotchety martinet in the classroom. No presentday student, one feels, would put up with his petty despotism.

NEVERTHELESS, I fell in love with Harvard that September of 1926, all unknowing, uncritical, happily deceived. Still, such after all is the way of love, and by the time I saw through my love, undeceived, I had learned at least one thing well worth the experience — the difference between imaginative and unimaginative scholarship.

The nature of the thing-in-itself, as a discipline or as an abstract virtue, I learned, apart from all question of its use and abuse, in my first fifteen seconds at Harvard. One single sentence did it. spoken by my adviser in studies, Frederic Norris Robinson, whom we all affectionately called either Fritz or Robby, a distinguished Chaucerian with a sound knowledge of early English and Celtic philology. He uttered it after I had outlined to him the project I proposed to work on while at Harvard. This ingenious project was to have been “The Possible Influence of Old Irish Verse on Anglo-Saxon Metrics,” which was exactly the sort of damn-fool project that young would-be scholars then loved to dream about o’ nights - until somebody like Robby taught them the elements of common sense.

Fritz, who, over forty or fifty years of study in medieval history, literature, and linguistics, had gathered more than a few facts about the places and centuries I proposed to deal with, listened patiently, and I may now well think quizzically, as I eagerly told him all about Iona and Lindisfarne, about the Celtic missionaries who had founded them, and about their possible (I said probable) influence on Northumbrian letters, pointing out to him that Caedmon (whom I regret to say I called “the Father of English Song”) had actually lived and worked in Whitby, which (I explained to Fritz) was a foundation, part hermitage, part monastery, that had grown up in the wake of those Irish missionaries. Having then given Fritz a little lecture on the nature of Irish metrics and of Anglo-Saxon metrics, and declared finally that “nothing would have been easier” than for the Irish verse mode to have influenced the Anglo-Saxon verse mode, I leaned back and awaited his approval.

For a few moments, Fritz, impassive as a bonze, breathing heavily, pipe-puffing, said nothing. Then, very slowly, in his pleasant double-bass, doublechinned, port-winey voice, he uttered the sentence. “Well,” he said, “it might be worthwhile ... to spend two or three years on it . . . just to see . . . if there is anything in it.”

It is a sentence that every neophyte might well hang over his bed and look at long and ponderingly every time he feels himself about to give birth to a bright idea. I have timed the sentence many times, and if I speak it slowly and breathingly, as Fritz did, it always takes fifteen seconds. Each time it sinks into my bowels like a very, very cold drink. If you care to pour it out rapidly and stir it briskly you will get Instant Harvard, vintage 1926, very dry.

I duly attended the classes recommended by Fritz. They were gruelers, especially his own, since there were only two students in each, myself and Ernie Simmons. I got an A in my courses. I grew a small beard. I bought a Model T Ford secondhand. And I ultimately got an A.M. in what the authorities called, in kindness, comparative philology, which it was not. To achieve even this little I worked as I never worked before or since, and while it lasted I felt as happy and as immortal as a student; for Edward Thomas was right when he said of Oxford that to a student life is forever. My happiness lasted until I found about the middle of my second term that the factual stocks I had accumulated with so much effort during my first term were already disappearing as slowly and surely as whiskey in an uncorked bottle.

IT IS easy to make friends in hospitable Boston. I began with a letter of introduction, brought with me from Ireland, addressed to Albert Kennedy, South End House, Union Park. I found the place with some difficulty. The house turned out to be a settlement house; tall, red brick, sedate, Victorian, one of about thirty others like it. The park was a railed-off, neglected subcity square. The surrounding quarter was more than seedy: it was Boston’s juiciest Skid Row, a rundown complex of old-time oblongs, polygons, circles, rhomboids, triangles, and elongated ovals crossed or connected by long grimy streets. I found this geometrical paradise for drunks and dope addicts so confusing that even after I had lived there for a year as a settlement worker I was always getting lost even by day, and I can testify that nobody knew the way around there after dark except the ancient drinkor dope-filled residents, the overworked priests of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the cops, and daring explorers accompanied by talking dogs.

Here Kennedy ran his settlement house. This he crisply defined on our first meeting as “an institution designed to fill in the educational gaps of a given geographical area.” It was typical of him to be so practical, and so wrong. I took to him immediately. He was a handsome man with a ready laugh, who looked as if he could have been a parson. In fact, he could not have been; he might have been; and he had hoped to be before he abandoned the seminary for a more humanitarian vocation. I liked his quick mind, his wry humor, and the impeccable craftsman’s taste with which he had transformed so much of the interior of this ugly old house into a pleasing sequence of livable and even elegant rooms.

At Harvard I was a backslider and a secret sinner, just barely hanging on to my learned studies. (I had this out with Fritz Robinson, explaining that my real interest was in literature and that I now proposed to try Project Two: an examination of Yeats’s philosophy. He agreed to it as skeptically as he had agreed to Project One.) I had written a long letter to Eileen telling her that if she did not come out and join me in America, where, perhaps, we might ultimately decide to live, I would chuck everything and return to Ireland. Her reply also awaited me: I was quite crazy, but she would join me. I did not write about any of this to the Commonwealth people in London. It was so far none of their business. Anyway, what could I have written except: “I want my girl here beside me. Please say you approve of us both”?

The brief spring burst into summer. As I awaited it I not only wrote on at “Fugue,” my story of danger, flight, and love, but began to jot down images, characters, and scenes for a novel to be set among the streams, reedy fields, and small villages of County Limerick and among the little side streets of Cork, I was like every man who is at once allured and troubled by his youthful experiences, especially all those attached to his memories of his first home; not, I think, that those memories press us to examine our image of home, but that the thought of home always presses us to examine our image of ourselves. It has happened to novelists from Grenoble, Paris, Oxford in Mississippi, away up in Michigan, Dublin, Gopher Prairie, Dorset. Terre Haute. Rouen — the examples are endless. So, that July of 1927, when I read with horror one morning that one of the ablest young ministers of the new Irish government, Kevin O’Higgins, had been assassinated in Dublin, I said. “This finishes Ireland for me!” — and went on writing about it more excitedly than ever before.

A painter has to have models. Sometimes he loves them. Sometimes all he can stand is the sight of them. But he has to have them.

EILEEN came off the liner from Cobh that August, as brown as a berry and looking very much a girl of the twenties, cloche hat, boyish hairstyle, straight jacket, short skirt.

I said. “That hat is like an upside-down saucepan.”

She looked at my Debussy-Edward VII beard and said. “That’s awful, it makes you look like Landru the multiple murderer.”

After which, I am convinced, she just refused to recognize its existence. (Every woman has an unchangeable image of the man she loves. He may age, grow bald, dye his hair green. She still sees him as she first knew him. Later, when I shaved off my beard, she did not observe the fact until I drew her attention to it.) She was delighted when a social worker, female, circled slowly about us and then, with a crooked look at me. asked her if she needed guidance. Having assured the kind lady that I was not a white slaver, I bundled Eileen into the Model T and drove her off with what dignity was left to me to settle ourselves into our quarters in South End Settlement House forthwith — which was a mistake, as I could see by the astonished look on her face as we drove through one seamy street after another. I had, of course, tried in my letters to forewarn her what to expect. All the same, it was something of a shock for a girl straight from the green hills of Cork to be lobbed without transition into the heart of Skid Row. If I had had any sense, I would have first driven her up to the Hill for lunch at the Bellevue, and then carried the Common and the Public Garden with us down to the South End. However, a day’s shopping revealed the more elegant side of Boston; and we drove the next day down to the sea, where the Kennedys had invited us for the weekend. After that we had the old Model T and were able to explore the nearby countryside together, and so relate things to things in proper proportion.

In the fall, having come too late to get a teaching job, she manfully set out to train herself as a secretary, helping in between, as I did, with the work of the settlement house — typing, taking neighborhood kids to poetry readings, rehearsing a play, or driving newly arrived immigrants and their young out of the city for a few hours of fresher air. I loved these outings, espeeially with the Syrians, sitting amongst them on the grass of some outlying park, talking about Damascus or Aleppo, or about Cork, Dublin, and Ireland.

I found that living in the middle of Boston made life much less cliquey and cloistered. VVe met a much wider variety of people. We felt close to the problems and preoccupations of the whole country — it was Coolidge’s last year as President, and the Hoover-Al Smith contest was just starting. For the first time I felt reasonably metropolitan. We were so lucky as to get two half-tickets — that is, tickets for alternate weeks — for the symphony; able to go at our ease to concerts of chamber music and to occasional recitals, drop in casually to the galleries of an idle afternoon, or run down to the wharves for a cup of orange pekoe among the smells of gasoline and fish, or, for a special occasion, count up our dollars and dine out.

When one is content it takes such a small bonus to brim over into active happiness. A skating party on the Charles could do it; a Sunday breakfast party in a friend’s apartment after Mass at the Cathedral; a few days skiing with some of the Fellows in New Hampshire; a glass of muscatel after the symphony in another friendly house; even one open door at Christmas in Louisburg Square, where every railing was white on the windy side and every candlelit window glinted on Aristides’ cap of snow. And every day I had Harvard and the Widener Library. I was free of philology. I was studying German, an essential for a master’s degree. I was listening in on Babbitt’s antiromanticism, which I always found lively and entertaining, and in retrospect think just a little odd. I found that he had had T. S. Eliot as a student. He said he considered him “a poor student,” which - if Babbitt meant “student” as disciple — one might be reasonably certain that Eliot was, even without the warm wording of his tribute to his old teacher: “To have once been a pupil of Babbitt’s was to remain always in that position. and to be grateful for (in my case) a very much qualified approval.” Meanwhile, I went on pursuing my researches into Yeats’s philosophy. About this Fritz Robinson was to prove right again. There really wasn’t “anything in it.” Yeats’s “philosophy” is a more or less fortuitous concourse of exciting impressions and ideas pouring into his tower like the golden sunbeams of Zeus impregnating Danaë. His “thinking” is inseparable from his poems. Does one listen to Mozart for his body of thought?

One thing astounds me as I look back at that year of 1927, and the year after it, and the year after that again — our utter improvidence. We had decided to get married in June of 1928, when my fellowship was due to run out. I had no prospect of a job, and Eileen had no certainty of one either (she did, fortunately, the following spring, bespeak a teaching job for 1928—1929 in an interesting progressive school). The most I could expect to have in the bank that June was about fifteen hundred dollars, which I was in duty bound, as a Fellow, to spend on travel in the States, and which I fully intended so to spend on a two-month honeymoon.

WE GOT married as secretively as if we were runaway lovers, very early on the morning of June 3, 1928, at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. It is a big place, and it was empty. The young priest was one Father Harry O’Connor. The only witnesses were the chapel woman, Mary Murphy, and the sacristan, Michael Sullivan. The fee was only ten dollars. We drove from the cathedral to Cambridge, to a tiny restaurant on Brattle Street, where we sat in a booth with our one close confidant, Ernie Simmons, who acted like an amused nonagenarian shepherding two teen-agers out into the vast, sunbaked continent of life, and of the United States, across the double stream of students coming and going across Harvard Square from nine o’clock and to ten o’clock lectures. We were quite silent until we had left the city behind us, and then, on an impulse, I stopped the car. I looked at my wife, she looked at me, and we both burst out laughing. “I feel,” each of us said, with one voice, “so happy!” We sat there for a while, staring first in laughing, then in silent, wonderment at one another under this blossoming tree of happiness that had grown about us as husband and wife. Then, too full of joy to speak, we drove on, south and south, in the sunlight of the gods.

I remember, above all, the apple orchard on a hilltop outside Taos, where we camped for two weeks with the Rio Grande at our feet and the Rockies before us, in all their ominous splendor, that, one evening, did something very strange and final to us both. We were lying outside our tent, side by side, entirely relaxed and at our ease, watching the sun set behind the distant mountains. When it had sunk behind them and the light slowly grew cold and dim, we began to talk about a thing we had often discussed during our travelings: could we live in this country always? As we talked I suddenly became aware that, by a trick of the light, a last cutoff peak seemed to stand up quite bare and quite alone across the plateau beneath us. The vast range had otherwise withdrawn itself like mountains in a vision; there was not a soul in sight; the dusk was absolutely silent. Even we were oppressed by the silence and ceased talking. There wasn’t even the least cry of a bird. It was an immeasurable night. And it wasn’t in the least bit impressive, because if those mountains had associations, we did not know them, if history — that is, if some sort of purposeful life, other than that of missionaries or explorers—ever trod this vastness, it had left no vibrations for either of us.

There in the darkness we made up our minds. We belonged to an old, small, intimate, and muchtrodden country, where every field, every path, every ruin had its memories, where every last corner had its story. We decided that we could only live in Europe, and in Ireland. Next morning we started on the first leg of the Long Voyage Home.

But to what? I thought a lot that night of what Henry James had said some fifty years before in the course of his famous lament about the shortcomings of life in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s New England, and as I recalled it, I wondered about Old Ireland. Here is part of the passage I was remembering that night as I lay in my camp bed:

The flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, and it takes a great deal of history to produc e a little literature, and it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. ... If one desires to enter as closely as possible into Hawthorne’s situation, one must endeavor to reproduce his circumstances. We are struck with the large number of elements that are absent from them, and the coldness, the thinness, the blankness present themselves so vividly that our foremost feeling is that of compassion for a romancer looking for subjects in such a field. It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle — it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.

At first thought this may seem quite unapplicable to Ireland. And yet — ? A complex social machinery? Would I find that in Ireland? If I were Anglo-Irish, like, say, Sheridan, Goldsmith, George Moore, Somerville and Ross, Wilde, or Shaw, and if, unlike all these, except Somerville and Ross, I had lived in Ireland, I would certainly have found a complex social life in the Ireland of their origin and their day. But since their day, a great leveling had begun in Ireland, and I was, though town-born, of the poor peasant stock that was mainly responsible for this modern leveling. All the people I had grown up with were outcroppings of the injured and oppressed who had risen up against England and the Anglo-Irish colonists. Would I find in this new Ireland what James meant by “a complexity of manners and types"? Or “an accumulation of history and custom”? In a folk sense, yes. But in his urbane sense, “the outlook indeed for an embryonic novelist would not seem to have been cheerful.” I could begin all right. In compiling notes and images for my first novel, I had already begun. Perhaps James might have even more pointedly said that it needs a complex social machinery to keep a writer in motion — But I am incapable now of distinguishing between what I vaguely felt that night above Laos and what I was later to find out when I came to close quarters with my problems as a working writer in my own land. All I know is that when we decided, in that silent dusk of New Mexico, to turn back, first to Cambridge and thence to Ireland, we knew we were making a grave choice, and I did not make it without grave misgivings.

We were back in Boston just before August ran out and our cash with it. We found a tiny demifurnished clapboard house just off Brattle Street, at Number 10A Appian Way, and settled down to domesticity. It had three rooms. It was like an oven in that damp August heat — I used to work in the boiler-basement — and promised to be freezingly cold in the winter. Friends loaned us things to lake the bare look off the little place, one bringing us a chair, another a rug, another a bed. We were so poor all that year that we had to limit ourselves to one pack of Luckies per week between us, and to one night at the movies. We never ate out, never drank, and — it was the false economy of greenhorns - lit the furnace only in the afternoon and let it die out during the night, so that we were always awakened early by the cold, hastened to rise, and breakfasted in our overcoats.

It was a good, tough year. I think it was a more than tough routine for Eileen, adapting herself to that strange, odd school, though she insisted that she enjoyed it and never complained. We were able to save enough for our tickets home and the sizable sum of two hundred pounds sterling to boot.

I got my A.M. I compiled my first book — very slim, fifty-one pages, a selection of lyrics and satires from Tom Moore — for the two Yeats sisters who owned the hand-set Cuala Press in Dublin. (My little book was really a way of finding out once for all if Tom Moore actually was a poet. I decided that he was, for about four or five occasions in his long career as a prolific versifier. He was at his best as a writer of lyrics for a nation’s music.) I gave an extension course at Boston College on Anglo-Irish literature. (This, too, was a weed ingout process. After I had done it, I could have said, coattailingly, yet truly enough, that there was nothing before George Moore in prose and Yeats in poetry except minor forerunners, who are now of no interest to anybody but historians.) I began to make a collection of translations from Old Irish verse, which was later published under the title of The Silver Branch. (Here there were riches in plenty.) But the most fateful thing that happened to me that year was that my story “Fugue” was published in September, 1928, in a remarkable Harvardian literary monthly called the Hound and Horn.

The H. and H., popularly known as the Bugle andBitch, had been founded in the autumn of 1917 by Lincoln Kirstein, then an undergraduate student, now the distinguished impresario of the New York City Ballet. With an amazing percipience he chose as editor a frail, Keatsian-looking poet from Maine, Richard Blackmur, whom he found working off Harvard Square in the Dunster Bookshop, owned by Maurice Firuski. a charming Yale man who now has a bookshop in Salisbury, Connecticut. Lincoln and Dick were ably helped by Varian Fry, who, in Dick’s words, was “wonderful at reading proofs.” Another young man, Bernard Bandler, put a lot of money into it in 1929; just in time, I must imagine, because alter 1929 few people put “a lot of money” into anything quite as lasting.

My connection with these and other young men associated with the H. and H. had one delightful effect on me. Listening to them gossiping about their day-by-day lives whenever they came to drink a cup of tea with us in our chicken coop at Number 10A Appian Way; or arguing hotly about literature in the office of the H. and H. in Harvard Square, with its bright red-framed reproductions of cover designs and photographs; or going off with Dick for a coffee or a bootleg beer, I found my image of Harvard changing completely. It was not alone that the eager zest of all these young men counterbalanced the dullness of the Teutons; or that their interests were so wide and contemporaneous; or that, through listening to them, I first really became interested in the modern metaphysicals, in E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, the Southern Fugitive group, Ezra Pound, and many more who, for various reasons, had hitherto passed over ray head. It was that through them I made the elementary but fundamental discovery, so elementary that I do not know why I had not made it long ago, that it is really the undergraduate who makes a university, gives it its lasting character, smell, feel, quality, tradition. You can never know a university, or ever belong to it, by entering it as a graduate student; it may even be that no professor coming to it late from another university will ever know it as well as his newcome sophomores, juniors, and seniors. It is these whose presence creates it and whose memories preserve it—its rakes, rapscallions, and idlers, its rebels and its aberrants, no less than its scholars, sloggers, and bright stars. It is to those that the first toast should be drunk at every university dinner: To every shade who here once was happy, because he was young. I think that it is in recognition of this truth and not from snobbery that your true Harvardian says, with just the faintest emphasis, that he went to Harvard College.

I am even more grateful to the H. and H. for another reason. I at once sent off the September issue, containing my story, out of the blue, to Edward Garnett, the most remarkable and influential publisher’s reader of his time in England, then working with Jonathan Cape. He wrote back those joyous words that every young writer dreams wildly of hearing someday from some reader of Garnett’s caliber: “You are a writer.” He also asked me to send him everything else I wrote and to call on him if I ever came to London. That letter alone would have made this year a complete success.

It was the happiest of my three years in America; swift as a stream of happiness whose moments I can no longer hold separate from one another. The hard winter died slowly. The spring exploded, the summer leaped on us, and soon commencement was in the offing. We made our last trip to the shore. We made the last round of our friends to say good-bye; in the street I met my first American beggar; f read in the paper that some big financier had thrown himself off the elevated at Columbus Circle; Widener was packed day and night with students cramming for their examinations; country cottages were waiting for the schools to close and fill them; and all our friends were talking happily of their holiday plans for Europe. We emptied 10A Appian Way, sold the old Model I for twentyfive dollars, packed our worldly goods into four suitcases, and at last walked up the gangway of our liner. It was far from crowded. More Americans seemed to be returning from Europe than going there. We had been happy in America, we made many good friends in Boston and Cambridge, but as we stood that evening on the deck and looked out over the empty spaces of the sea, and heard the engines pulsing and the waves swishing, what we mostly felt was the pleasure of knowing that we would soon be seeing old familiar places, back where we belonged.

Seven days later, when the liner dropped anchor in Cobh Harbor, with the same green hills bright across the bay, and the same gulls squawking and wheeling about the masts, and the ship’s orchestra playing the same old sentimental tune, and we leaned on the gunwale picking out in the bright moonlight the spots we knew along the coast, we were certain that nothing here would have changed a jot. So far as I knew there was only one change in me. I now knew for certain what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write about this sleeping country, those sleeping fields, those sleeping villages spread before my eyes under the summer moon.

Fade in the slow music — “back to Erin, Mavourneen, Mavourncen”—step up the music. And as the tender draws slowly away from under the tall flank of the ship toward the moon-white shore, fade softly out.