Except for Virgil Swain.
The way I see it, it was generous and heartfelt. As big Tom Dempsey says, Irish people are appallingly good at giving. So there was not only the first response — A book? — and the universal follow-up — Am I in it? — there was a shy pride, a prayerlike hope, and among adults a quiet but widespread gladness, as if in our parish poetry had become congregational.
Chapter 3
How long does it take for someone to see your soul?
Let’s say there are soul-seers. Let’s say that’s their business. Let’s say they’ve been anointed-appointed for this single task. For souls they’ve got the Zenith Standard. They’ve got Paragon guidelines, Excellence Exemplars. They’ve got Pinnacle sunglasses, perfect vision, and those amber close-fitting 1970s Star Trek suits. Their whole reason for being is to look for these souls. They’ve got their instructions. They’re moving out and they’re all the time on Alert, Transporters set on Ready.
Dazzlement is what they’re after.
Like shining, from shook foil.
They’re looking for ones who have given themselves to what is most intensely seen and felt, ones who because of their natures could not see and feel it without wanting to be closer to it, whose own nature could be a kind of restless yearning, who became oddities, lived in margins, who had before them a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else, so that disappointment was keen and constant, their hair turned silver and their eyes the blue of the sea and the sky.
Let’s say the soul-seers go to their work each day.
Let’s say they focus their beams.
How long would it take to find him?
Because Mrs Quinty had the necessary attributes for playing a minor character, and could remove herself from scenes, my father did not notice that she had been at his table and typed his poems. In matters of his personal space he was not particular. Like Ted Hughes, for a poem he would have squeezed himself into a corner. He did not notice the copies had been touched because he was not thinking of readers. He knew the poems were so far below Readers that that never entered his head. That’s what I understand now. I understand that he bore them mostly out of the spirit of chastisement, not unlike Thomas Dawes whose failings were secret until he fathered a whole family of cross-eyed sons, each one better at crashing cars than the one before, and only one of whom was sometimes sober.
Virgil still went to his table in the evenings. He still read with voracious appetite, the fat, second-hand, 1,902 pages of The Riverside Shakespeare (Book 1,604, Houghton Mifflin, Boston) becoming a kind of bible, but he did not pick up the pencil. He did not take-off.
Although you never really know what your parents are feeling, although you can’t quite enter the world as them and see it from inside their eyes, I knew my father was lost, and like Mam I too wanted to rescue him. Maybe some part of it was that I wanted that moment in the future when Prospero says to Miranda, Thou wast that did preserve me, but mostly it was just love.
I thought by asking him to write me a poem whatever was stalled inside him might restart.
‘Will you?’
His long body was twisted in the chair, face angular, silvery beard climbing up his cheeks. His face was composed now, but his eyebrows were these mad wispy filaments, like the way Sean Custy’s fiddle strings curl off the fiddle head, or Paudie O leaves the extra bits of wires when he’s wired something, as if a reminder that music and electricity were live things and could not be contained.
‘Doesn’t have to be a long one,’ I said.
Two deep creases came either side of his mouth. ‘I’m sure I can find a poem written to a Ruth.’
‘That’s not what I want. I want yours.’
He turned to the table covered in books, pushed a hand up the side of his beard. It made the slightest crackle. He pulled it down across his mouth. Beside The Riverside Shakespeare was Tolstoy’s Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Books 2,888 & 2,889, Penguin Classics, London) as well as the green American hardcover of Seamus Heaney’s Poems 1965–1975 (Book 2,891 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York), the white paperback with the black and white photograph of Robert Lowell holding his glasses and leaning to his left beneath the scarlet title Selected Poems (Book 2,892 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, London), John Donne in a mad black hat and with arms folded on the cover of the fat John Donne, The Complete English Poems (Book 2,893, Penguin Books, London), But, besides all of these, the book my eye fell on was the small white paperback of W.B. Yeats’s Selected Poems (Book 3,000, Pan Macmillan, London) because it was open on ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and because across the page my father had written something in tiny black ink, as if with the poem or the poet he was in dialogue.
At last my father looked back at me. ‘What would you like it to say?’
‘I don’t mind.’ I thought I was being helpful. I didn’t understand the problem, the agony and mystery of it. I didn’t understand then as I do now. I didn’t understand that what he wanted in his poems was Life, and that he couldn’t summon it. Suddenly the air in the room was close, the rain louder, and I knew I had brought him to a naked place. I had brought him where Swains always end up, in the white glare of their own failure. But I would not stop. ‘Will you?’
He turned fully towards me and he took my hands. ‘Will you write one for me?’ he asked.
His eyes held me. They held me in a way I will never forget, not because of the blueness or the river depth or the shine, not because of the sadness or the defeat but because it seemed right then that in his eyes was a whole history of yearning and in asking me to write he was passing it to me.
‘Mine will be bad,’ I said.
‘But you’ll write me one?’
‘I will if you will. So, will you?’ I shook his two hands for an answer. ‘Please? Promise?’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise. Now, say “I promise to write something for Ruth.” ’
‘I promise to write something for Ruth.’
In the meantime, we waited. We waited for London to write back. Mam dropped in to the post office; Mrs Prendergast gave her ‘No’ with her eyes, and didn’t let on that everyone in the queue knew what Mam was waiting for, and that everyone had perfect confidence the news would be good. Because Faha is like that. People like a home victory. Unlike Tommy Tuohy, who enjoys cursing Man U, the team he supports, people here are generous once something goes outside the parish. They want it to do well. They supposed that, London being London, there was a fair mountain of poems to be got through and it might take some time, but they knew. They knew because my father was Virgil Swain, and because now that they thought about it, he was more or less exactly what a man who had a book of poetry sent to London should look like.