“You’ll get like Grimshaw,” I countered poorly.
“I wouldn’t mind a bit being the old Colonel. Very exhilarating, I should say. Except I have hardly his constitution. No matter. One of the reasons of art’s supremacy is just because of the very limitations of life. There will be no art in heaven. You should know that, old boy, you university types. Did you bring the family jewels along?”
“As usual,” I handed him the pages.
“Up to your usual high standard, no doubt,” he flipped through the pages. “Ireland wanking is Ireland free. Not only wanking but free. Not only free but wanking as well.”
It tripped out easily, like the well-worn shoe that it was; but once he began to read he was silent.
He, too, had ambitions to be a poet once, in the small midland town where we first met, he a reporter on the local Echo, I just out of university, a temporary teacher of English at the Convent Secondary School. Such as he and I who worked in the town but were not from it were known as runners, and all runners of any standing lodged at Dempsey’s Commercial Hotel — Maloney, myself, a solicitor, four women teachers, men and women who worked in the banks, a poultry instructress, the manager of the flour mill, and the whole of the A. I. station, its five inseminators and the two office girls.
All spring and summer Maloney had gone out with Maureen Doherty, a local postman’s daughter who worked in Dr Gannon’s office. Sometimes they came to the tennis club but more often they went for long solitary walks into the country or along the wooded bank of the river. Maloney seemed always to walk a few feet ahead of the girl, lecturing on the books he’d got her to read, quoting reams of deadening verse.
“Nothing sweetens pedagogy like a little sex. Nothing sweetens sex like a little pedagogy,” Newman, the manager of the flour mill, nodded his sage head in Dempsey’s. “Except usually it ends disastrously with the pupil coming of age.”
Maureen was blonde and small and exceedingly pretty. Tiring of his strenuous self-absorption she threw Maloney over for a young vet who came to town that August and who had also taken up lodgings in Dempsey’s. Humiliated and numbed Maloney went completely into his shell that autumn, spending all his evenings in his room and it was even rumoured that he was writing a novel. Down at the Echo office his rows with Kelly the editor increased in ferocity whenever Kelly insisted on removing some of the “rocks” or “jawbreakers” Maloney was fond of using in his column, which were clearly acts of aggression against his readers, whom he despised and was fond of describing as “the local pheasantry, crap merchants and bull-shitters”.
And then one evening, drawing up to Christmas, he rounded us all up after the hotel tea — bank clerks, teachers, the solicitor, the poultry instructress, old Newman of the flour mill, the artificial inseminators, even the young vet, whose VW was seldom seen in the evening without a happy-looking Maureen Doherty, and shepherded us upstairs to the big lounge where he had already a fire lighted. With much nudging, low giggles, scraping of chairs and feet he read his poem, in rhyming couplets, of lost love, seemingly oblivious of the blatant discourtesies. And no matter how loud they might scrape or cough no one could boast of having escaped the reading. When he finished, everybody applauded, relieved that love’s labours at last had ended.
Warmed by the applause he explained that there were two kinds of poets. One, having written the poem, would comment no further, insisting that the poem speak for itself out of its own clarity or mystery. While he respected the position he did not number himself among that persuasion. He was someone who was prepared to analyse every line or syllable, and he had no hesitation in admitting that the source of the poem was frankly autobiographical. He had been in love, had failed in love, and out of the loss had grown the poem.
He warned against the confusion between art and life. Art was art because it was not nature. Life was a series of accidents. Art was a vision of the law. Rarely did the accident conform to the Idea or Vision, so it had to be invented or made anew so that it conformed to the Vision. In short, it was life seen through a personality. Which brought us to the joyous triumph of all art. For, though life might be intolerable or sad, the very fact of being able to bring it within the law made it a cause for joy and celebration. Or, to put it more crudely, though in this particular autobiographical case the girl was lost, it was through the particular loss that the poem had been won.
Afterwards, impervious to laughter or ribaldry, he insisted on buying his whole audience a drink, even forcing the young vet who tried to make protestations that he had to be away to stay. With the same imperviousness, Maloney began his first pornographic paper, defied the obsolete censorship laws in much the same way as he defied the sense of embarrassment provoked by poetry at Dempsey’s — by simply remaining oblivious of it — and made it a success against all predictions. And he’d gone on from there to become the rich and fairly powerful man he now was. I suspected he paid me the higher rate he did as much out of affection for the old times as out of any belief that I could manufacture those sexual gymnastics any better than any of the several other hacks he hired.
I ordered two more pints, placing the fresh pint beside his unfinished one on the ledge. He made small notes or changes as he read and I knew they’d all be improvements. Time was suspended as I watched him. I watched his face register the world of the words, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael. It is a chastening sight to watch somebody totally absorbed in a world you yourself have made.
“It’s good. As always. That’s what’ll juice them up. There’s just these few changes.”
He got curious pleasure from the changes, almost standing back to admire the line of the sentences, like someone admiring the true line of a wall he has just straightened.
“Nobody can stand anybody else, of course. You’re one person who really knows that, aren’t you? You just have to have someone you like stay in your house for a few days to find that out. It’s all got to do with room. But we can all stand a lot of the Colonel and Mavis,” and he began to tell me what to do in the next story. The couple should be split up in Majorca. Mavis should be given a bullfighter and the Colonel a brown-skinned Arab girl of fifteen or sixteen.
“You should write it yourself.”
“No. I’m too busy. And I wouldn’t manage it right,” he handed me a brown envelope.
“Thanks,” I could feel the notes in it as I took it.
“By the way, I’m expecting Moran any minute,” he named the most powerful newspaper man in the city. “You don’t mind meeting him?”
“Of course not. Why should I?” I was determined at once to deprive Maloney of his pleasure. One of his few new pleasures since becoming rich was to spring someone powerful or famous on his ordinary company and to stand back and observe.
“You should have seen her crawl to impress him, indecent ambition suddenly all over the place,” he’d remark as if remembering a good wine. “One moment his feathers were all preened and the next completely drooped. It was like the effect a pike might have on a shoal of perch,” I remembered hearing him boast.
“You don’t seem very impressed. Or are you just hiding it?” he berated me now.
“I’m too old. And I know you too well. Besides, I have to go in a few minutes.”
“Where are you going to now? You seem to be always going some place.”
“To a dance. To the Metropole.”
“All the young whores and the rich baldies.”
“Do you want to come?”
“I have to go home after I see Moran. Dada has to say good-good night, tuck the hush-a-baby in, go to safe-safe sleep, or Mama will spank-spank,” he mimicked before adding sharply, “You seem to have escaped all that crack?”