We saw The Leopard in the cinema aboard and enjoyed it more for the scenery and for what it might have been than what it was. The last night, as we approached Ireland, there was fog, and consequently thoughts of immortality. The name Nieuw Amsterdam struck me as just right for a sea disaster, doubtless because of Hopkins’s poem about the wreck of the Deutschland or something. Ireland grey and grey and grey and then seen closer, green, green, green: the same old tender coming out to meet us, the same old fat man employed by American Express, and the wonderful consideration shown by porters and customs men and baggage men, as always, which is why, when you travel in the other direction, you are almost killed by New York.
Train to Cork (from Cobh), from Cork to Dublin, and on to Dun Laoghaire, and then by cab (“You must have a very big trunk — boot, that is — to get all that luggage stored away”—“Vauxhall has a very big boot, sir”) to the Trenarren Hotel in Greystones. It is not, we saw right away, the hotel we had in mind. It is dumpy in its furnishings but excellent in its cuisine, miraculously so, and we’ll be all right, I guess, for the next four months. The boys went to school today, Christian Brothers, and seemed to fare very well, and this I regard as a blessing from God, as I feared this aspect of our trip as much as any. We had tea with the O’Faolains this afternoon. They say we could buy a house with only a little down, but, though this is news to me, I don’t know. I have been so busy cursing Doubleday and the American reading public for not giving me a bestseller that the idea of lighting a candle is strange to me. Now I’ll close with gratitude to you all — for your various favors, especially the ladies.
Jim
FRED AND ROMY PETTERS
Trenarren Hotel
Greystones, County Wicklow
October 7, 1963
Dear Fred and Romy,
[…] For the last five or six days we’ve been running the hotel by and for ourselves. This, in the former respect, mostly means Betty, who even now is down in the kitchen — one of them — scraping grease off the wall behind the stove — one of them. I want you to understand what I’m saying but can only bear to look in for moments at a time in that region: there are what we would call four or five large rooms down there, all parts of the cooking setup: a room with stoves in it, one with a sink, one with a refrigerator, and so on, so that Betty gets plenty of exercise whenever she prepares a meal.
I am writing this from my office in the unused half of the hotel, somewhat away from the madding crowd. I have a distant view of the sea and a much better one of a filling station where there are Mobiloil and Castro signs, the latter being some kind of gas or oil, I guess. […]
What I should’ve said right away is that you don’t have to send a money order for the car; in fact, you don’t have to pay for it immediately, or even soon. […] Here was what gave me constant trouble: the hubcaps. Do not remove them unless you have to, and if you do, be sure you have them on just so or they’ll come off — they depend entirely on those little metal flanges which get bent and oh, what the hell … […] Be very careful, in this connection, Fred, or you’ll have missing hubcaps, and if there is anything that looks bad, it is a car with missing hubcaps, I think. Better you lose your manhood than your hubcaps. […]
Jim
JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL
Trenarren Hotel
Greystones, County Wicklow
October 8, 1963
Dear Jody and Joe,
[…] Boz asks me when we’re alone, walking down the street, why I don’t buy a house, and I tell him or I don’t, depending how I feel, but in a day or so or a week it happens again, and he is very gentle about it, and quite hopeless, I sense, that I’ll be able to pull it off. I see myself as an alcoholic at such times — not a bad person, really, but one from whom little can be expected. That, in outline, may be my problem. […]
You are there and we are here. I can see the sea out my window, about two blocks away, and it is municipal-swimming-pool green close to shore, with low whitecaps, and deep green on the horizon. Right across the road from the hotel, as I told Fred and Romy in a letter yesterday, is a filling station with Mobiloil, Shell, and Castrol signs, and not Castro signs, as I reported yesterday. My electric fire is on (and my own fires are banked), and I still have some wiring jobs to do on lamps if I decide to spend the evening hours here instead of in our bedroom, where we have an electric fire, Scotch and Irish (his and hers), and Boz’s transistor radio. We have been absolutely nowhere socially — tea once with the O’Faolains. The Dublin Theatre Festival came and went. We get The Irish Times delivered daily, and The Observer, Sunday Times, and Telegraph on Sunday, which, with churchgoing, pretty well takes care of that evil day. […]
We have just had lunch, Betty and I, tea, roast beef (not good) sandwiches, and several kinds of cheese, with nobody home but us and Jane and Terry. The latter is our dog. Only on loan, fortunately, the property of the hotel owners, who thought they wouldn’t be able to find accommodations for all three of them (they have no children) in London. Terry is a woolly dog, spayed (I believe the term is), with the body, or flesh consistency, of a woman, to the touch, that is. This I noticed this morning, when searching for fleas (we all seem to have bites). He (I refer to Terry) is a pleasant enough dog, has very intelligent brown eyes, and the kids love him. I can’t look at him, though, without wanting to clean him up, beginning with Murine for his eyes, which are suffering from erosion at the corners. Betty really has to take care of him: take him out at night, remove his collar, tuck him under his blanket in what is known as the Smoking Room here at the Trenarren.
Here there are Aer Lingus schedules for the summer of 1962 (take one) and a small so-called billiard table, with holes into which you try to get the balls to drop (it is like a pinball machine, not a pool table, though covered with good green felt). I must say I looked forward to a game when, on the first night here, the proprietor invited me to take the children into the Smoking Room whenever I felt like it, for a game of billiards. But you have to put in a sixpence, in order to open up the holes, and get about ten minutes of play. This, as you might imagine, can mount up with a family the size of ours all waiting to use the table and nobody but Betty and Himself with the slightest idea of the relationship there is between a sixpence piece and real money. There is a humming noise while the ten minutes are running out, and everybody seems to feel that this adds to the fun — a noise from somewhere in the table. What I was going to say, though, is that wherever Terry goes, there is a slightly doggy odor, and a layer of lanolin, too, and he goes everywhere, following the sun from bed to bed, room to room, during the day. I guess that ought to fill you in, along with what Betty will tell you in her letter. […]
We are glad to hear that Romy was delivered of her baby and that all is well.3 We hadn’t heard until your letters came. Now, for the love of life, why don’t you get Fred drunk and back him into a lathe or something? What about Dr D. in the role of the disbarred famous surgeon, asked to do a job, and actually turning in a whale of a performance for a half-pint? While you, Joe, and Dickie, and Dick Palmquist, and Leonard play cards in the next room, a candle in a bottle, and Jody is stalking around in a coat from Petters’s Furs? Somebody switches on the TV (updated from radio), and there we see the president of the United States (played by J. F. Powers) just completing a fireside talk on crime when suddenly, seen through the window, there are headlights — commercial here — and more headlights — and oodles of monks* pouring out of squad cars — too late, though, to prevent the operation. Titled Tragedy in Hardon County.