Words without End, Amen

Words without End, AmenAuthor(s): Oliver MacDonaghSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 26 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 109-113Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735998 .

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Words WitJii^Jfid, Amen

OLIVER MACDONAGH

Iwas

born and grew up under lucky verbal stars. They say that one never

forgets the number of one's first car. I don't: ZF641 forever. Nor shall I

ever forget the name of my first proper book, Treasure Island. Not that I read

it myself at the age of four. It was my father who read it to me, night by

night, at bedtime. He was an undramatic reader. The colour came from the

written, not the spoken words.Yet I strove desperately each night to save off

the snap with which he closed the dingy, limp red volume which had been

his own school text twenty-odd years before.

'Please, Daddy, please, please, please. You can skip tomorrow if you'll go on

tonight. Please, Daddy, just this once. I'll never ask again!' He must have been well accustomed to this sort of plea. It was after all (in

childish language) what he, as a country bank manager, must have heard a

dozen times a week from debt-drowning customers in the 1930s. He almost

always said 'No' to me also.

Yet it is the nightly thrills of fear that I remember best. From its very

beginning, Treasure Island is ? or was for me, at any rate ? a terrifying chil?

dren's book. How my heart thumped ? like hammer-beats echoing the

tap-tap-tap of the blind beggar's stick upon the road. I supped fullest of its

horrors when, in imagination, I crouched in that apple-barrel with Jim Hawkins while Long John Silver, almost close enough to hear my faintest

breath, set out his treacherous schemes. It was certain death to have been dis?

covered. All the same, I went on sleeping soundly once the lights were out,

panted to have more, and fell into a lifelong love of words.

I was very lucky that it was Stevenson that was first read to me, I can't

think of a better sort of writing for a child to hear. He is the supreme narra?

tor, and it is with stories that we all begin. His English is clear as glass,

MACDONAGH, 'Words Without End, Amen', Irish Review 26 (2000) 109



straightforward, all sinews and muscle, free from every shadow of redundancy or the contrived. His words are simple where simple words will do, but,

where not, the right terms duly take their place. What could be plainer, yet more seductive in its rhythms, that the opening scene of Treasure Island?

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn

door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong,

heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his

soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a

dirty, livid white. I remember him

looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then

breaking into that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards: Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest

? yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! in the high,

old, tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the

capstan bars.

My second stroke of fortune was a Montessori kindergarten education, which taught me to read early on. I can still hear the class of'B'y, t'y, j'y', the

local variant of'boy, toy, joy', and see the ever-changing letters on the black?

board. Almost anything printed was grist to my crude little mill. I became

one of those dreadful children who read even what is written on labels for

want of anything else in sight. Or, to look at it in a better light, I had

acquired a beneficent addiction.

'Comics' (as the earnest schoolboy weeklies, devoted to soccer heroes and

English public school h-junks, were curiously called) were, of course, my

early staple diet. A few children's classics came my way. Lambs Tales I found

hopelessly complex, Alice in Wonderland a bewilderment, but Gullivers Travels

just right for a very literal-minded child: I loved its exactitude and the

solemn interplay of scales. I worked ? or rather tore my way delightedly ?

through the William and Biggies stories. But the first really substantial book I

read myself ? as I counted substance at the age of twelve ? was another

Stevenson, this time Kidnapped. Its language was more difficult than Treasure

Island's and, the narrator being a Lowland Scot, necessarily more idiomatic.

Yet even this was gain: who could forget Alan Breck's 'auld, cauld, dour, dei

dly' courage, so superior to the pedestrian English, 'old, cold, dour and

deadly'. At any rate, the old magical Stevenson prose and rippling run of nar?

rative worked on me as powerfully as ever - or rather very much better, as I

had by now some rudimentary concept of composition.

Although I scarcely knew the word, let alone thought the thought delib?

erately, I was already groping about for a style. Heaven only knows what

dreadful purple pages, misused foreign phrases, pomposities, latinities, jams of

piled-up adjectives and swollen gerunds I floundered through as my fancy

110 MACDONAGH, 'Words Without End, Amen', Irish Review 26 (2000)



swung crazily in tune with whatever I happened to be reading. It might be

too much to say that the murky waters turned crystalline and hardened. But

by the time I left school I had my own magnificent seven, the stylists who

made me cry out almost aloud, 'the achieve of, the mastery of the thing' ?

Swift, Austen, Hazlitt, Newman, Belloc, Orwell, Waugh: steely, driving, bril?

liant, epigrammatic, enchanting stylists, all electric, in one way or another,

with writer's energy. I suppose that they are still my magnificent seven,

although I have to own a sneaking liking for one who is their polar opposite, the convoluted and absurdly over-mannered Meredith. But it was Treasure

Island and Kidnapped that began all this.

My third happy chance in learning about words was my childhood stam?

mer. This was quite bad by the time my aunt Florence ? we children called

her Fluff, most inappropriately, for she was thin, wiry and darting ? came to

live with us. I was then about six years old.

'You can't possibly let that child grow up with that affliction', she

announced in her brisk way, 'I know the way to cure him ? teach him

poetry'

By poetry, she meant jog-trot verse, mostly Longfellow and Kipling, with a

lacing of Tennyson and de la Mare; and this she proceeded to drill into me,

day and night. The really strange thing about Fluff's system was that it

worked, within six months my stammer was virtually gone. In this process, I

had acquired, willy-nilly, countless lines of mediocre poetry. To this day, I can

reel off 'The Runaway Slave' and 'I remember the black wharves and the

slips' and 'If and 'On the Road to Mandalay'; and it is surprising how useful

it is to have quotations of any sort that rise unbidden to the surface as occa?

sion calls.

I had also acquired, willy-nilly, an unfailing ear for poetic rhythm ? at any

rate, of the simpler sort. When the time came, I seemed to scan lines auto?

matically. Automatically, I would wince at wrong emphases or an infelicitous

order in the words. And this spilled over, though less surely, into the more

subtle harmonies, and cunningly contrived discords, of prose. Fluff's system was full of unconvenanted gains. The disease proved well worth the cure.

My final piece of fortune was to grow up in a world where Synge's Eng? lish was still often to be heard. Of course, it was not to be heard with

anything like the density or extravagance of Synge's peasant language. But

the underlying constructions, cadences and range of words survived, albeit in

much milder and more occasional form. 'The flies is woeful arrogant

tonight,' said a farmer saluting us on a summer evening's walk.'Ah, 'twas only

like a daisy in the mouth of a bull,' said a labourer deprecatingly when con?

gratulated on the speed with which he lowered a pint of Guinness. 'Can he

eat? And we only passing one another on the stairs with trays,' said the sister




of a tiresome invalid. 'Abroad in the haggard', said everyone, indicating 'out?

side in the barn'. Thus I grew up steeped, unwittingly, in a variety of

vocabulary and imagery quite outside the ordinary run of words and word

use. It bred in me a habit of always feeling about, without consciously

thinking much about it, for fresh or arresting ways of saying things. All this welled in time into an itch to write myself, and even to be pub?

lished. As things turned out, I was to be my own first publisher. When I was

about nine, I published a newspaper for my elementary school. Every word

of it was written by me, with the letters in childish imitation of typeface; I

drew the illustrations, execrably, as pseudo-photographs. The banner-head

ran the National School Weekly, the production run was two copies and the

price only one penny. There were no sales of either the first or second (and

last) edition.

A year or so later, I had turned to poetry and actually attained the glory of

paper print. The owner-editor of the Carlow Nationalist, an uncle s friend, was

persuaded in a kind, weak moment to publish one of my effusions, signed 'Oliver MacDonagh, aged 10'. Doubtless fortunately, I can remember only the opening line:'O, Vale of Avoca, where grows Tom Moore's tree'. At least, it meant the sale of an extra dozen copies of the Nationalist ? to my foolishly

proud parents.

All through my school days, my passionate affair with words continued. I

read with gluttonous indiscrimination, but also a simple faith in the then

canon of'great literature'. I slogged my way through lines of Complete

Works, such as those of Scott or Thackeray, the very thought of doing which

would make me feel faint today. I tried to get parts in plays, though my words

on stage were usually confined to 'Ho, sirrah' and the like. Above all, I went

on scribbling lines.

In time, my early doggerel turned into jingling verse, and jingling verse

into poetry of a sort. In my last year at school, two of my poems were pub? lished in the Irish Monthly, an old and honourable Jesuit journal in which,

legend had it,Yeats's earliest poems had appeared. For a night or two, I was the

hero of the senior school, who was granted

? remember these were innocent

days ? the 'privilege' of evening 'smokes' in honour of the achievement.

When I went on to university in Dublin, I gravitated naturally towards the

writing set. We all had manuscripts hidden inside our jacket pockets, to be

inflicted tentatively, sooner or later, on one another. We all sat timidly on the

edges of groups in the literary pubs where the giants of the day, such as Flann

O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh, held surly court. We all looked on editors as

so many St Peters with the keys to heaven. Early on, I had a poem published in the university magazine and it received mild (but perhaps also deadly)

praise as 'clever'. I

began, and re-began, and re-began a novel. But gradually it

112 MACDONAGH, 'Words Without End, Amen', Irish Review 26 (2000)



was borne in on me that it was all no good. Gradually, I realised that I was

totally lacking in creative imagination; I had never had, and never would

have, the divine spark. So I became an historian, went off to Cambridge, and lived happily ever

after. My love of words however, was unabated. I could exercise it only in the

lower pastures, not on the bright, sun-glanced uplands. But even that has

always been good enough. The verbal good fairies who blessed my child?

hood and adolescence did not cast their spells altogether in vain.




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Words without End, Amen