From the Kenyon Review, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, 1969
Tim Traynor was the curate in the Start of the Sea Church in Sandymount, Dublin. I had met him first through Sean O’Faolain when Tim was curate in Adam and Eve’s Church. He brought us down to the vaults to see the coffin of Leonard MacNally, the informer who betrayed Robert Emmett, and as we left he gave the coffin a thundering kick. He did the same with all visitors, and it was something you liked or did not like as the case might be. It was so typical of Traynor that I liked it.
We became friends only when he came as curate to Sandymount and lived in the presbytery in Leahy’s Terrace—which has been beautifully described by Joyce. It was almost the fashion to say that he was an interesting man who should never have been a priest, and my friend Hayes—the seed and breed of priests and himself everything I admired in certain priests of the older generation-said it to me several times. I knew he was warning me against Traynor, and if he had seen me at a country race meeting, putting on bets for Traynor, who was not allowed to bet himself, he would have said it even louder. They disapproved of one another, and Traynor in his conspiratorial way told me that Hayes owned slum property.
He had the sort of face that in later years I saw oftener in New York and Boston than in Ireland—the pugilistic Irish face, beefy and red and scowling, with features that seemed to have withdrawn into it to guard it from blows; a broad, blunted nose and a square jaw. Except for the good looks it had a lot in common with the face of a man named Fred Higgins, just as his character had a lot in common with Higgins’. Fred was a Protestant with all the vices of a Catholic, and except for the one small difference this might serve also as a description of Traynor. He was as conspiratorial as Higgins and much more malicious. If you were injured by one of Higgins’ intrigues there was nothing much to blame for it but the will of God, but Traynor, in pursuing some imaginary grievance, would invent and carry through cruel practical jokes. When he swaggered into my room of an evening I would sometimes ask, “Well, which is it to be tonight, Nero, Napoleon, or St. Francis of Assisi?” Most often it was Nero.
“It’s that fellow Jenkins. Wait till I tell you!”
Yet I never really felt that he was not a good priest, and he gave me an understanding of and sympathy with the Irish priesthood which even the antics of its silliest members have not been able to affect. It was merely that his temperament and imagination constantly overflowed the necessary limits of his vocation as they would have overflowed the limits of almost any calling, short of that of a pirate. Yet they also enriched his character, so that you felt if he lived for another twenty years he would be a very fine priest indeed. It was significant to me that our old friend, the Tailor of Gougane Barra, who had a trick of nicknaming all his acquaintances in ways that stuck, instantly christened Traynor “The Saint.” You always underestimated Traynor if you paid attention only to the devil and forgot the saint.
It was characteristic of him that he became really friendly with me only when he discovered that as boys we had both had a romantic crush on the same girl. He had had better fortune than I, for one night he had seen her home from college up Summer Hill, and all the way they had held hands without exchanging a word. When the man she was proposing to marry had held back she had complained of him to Traynor; he had advised her and they had remained friends until her death.
It was also characteristic of him that when I left his rooms that night he insisted on my taking the only picture he had of her. That was not only the new friend and the outburst of generosity; it was also the priest who knew he should not brood on a dead girl’s picture.
But, of course, he brooded just the same. The emotional expansiveness that overflowed the limitations of his profession made him brood on all the might-have-beens of his life, and they were endless. I used to make fun of his rooms, which were a museum of all the might-have-beens: books on science, history, art; paintings, sculptures, a shotgun that needed cleaning, and a cinematograph that wouldn’t work—all passions pursued with fury for a few weeks till each in turn joined the exhibits on view. It was not only Nero and St. Francis who alternated in his strange, complex character but Einstein, Michelangelo, and Gibbon as well.
Sometimes, when I visited him, he would come to meet me with the big fist out, swaggering with excitement. “How are you? You’re looking fine. You’ll have a drink. Listen! I have a great wine here. This is something special.” (Just like a boy with a new gadget.)
“How much did it cost, Tim?”
“Five and six,” he would say wonderingly, turning back from the drink cupboard. “He had only a case of it left. Wasn’t I lucky? Wait till you try it!”
Wine was only a sketch of an escape route, because Traynor was no drinker. Another, and more profitable, one was a career in the world. One evening, when he came to me, acutely depressed about some frustration, I asked, “Tim, why the hell don’t you cut your hook and get out?”
Traynor had no intention of cutting his hook, and he knew me too well to imagine that I was slighting his vocation; it was the chance of exploring another might-have-been that attracted him.
“Why?” he asked shamefacedly. “What could I do if I did get out?”
“You wouldn’t starve.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t, but what could I do?”
“If you’d gone to America five years ago you’d probably be a millionaire by now.”
“Do you think so?” (By this time he was beginning to light up again.)
“I’m damn’ sure of it. I can easily see you in a big office, giving everyone hell.”
“You might be right,” he admitted wistfully. “I’d love to be able to get things done.”
He was always trying to get things done, and he wasn’t always as successful as he was with St. Brigid’s Thighbone. This was a wonderful story, and all the more remarkable because he did not realize how funny it was. He was curate of a new church in Killester which was being dedicated to St. Brigid, and in one of his manic phases Traynor imagined how wonderful it would be if the church contained a genuine relic of the saint. The only reported relic was a thighbone which was in a convent somewhere in the Peninsula—Portugal, I think, or it may have been Spain. He got round his parish priest—parish priests are the bane of an active curate’s life—received the blessing of the kindly old Archbishop, and set off armed with letters of introduction to the Portuguese Department of Antiquities, the Portuguese Foreign Office, and above all to the Cardinal who controlled the contents of churches, monasteries, and convents throughout the country.
The trouble was he could not get anywhere near the Cardinal Day after day, he haunted the Cardinal’s palace, and the greasy Monsignore who acted as secretary said regretfully that the Cardinal was away, that he was opening a convent outside the city, was at lunch with some gentleman from the Curia, or was merely taking his siesta and could not be disturbed. Meanwhile, Traynor’s leave of absence had almost expired and he dreaded the thought of returning to Dublin without having accomplished anything whatever.
“I was desperate, I tell you,” he said, scowling with remembered panic. “That last day I went up, I saw the same greasy brute. No, the Cardinal was lying down. No, immediately he got up he would have to leave for an important engagement. So I said to myself, ‘There’s nothing those dagoes can do to me. I’m not in my own diocese.’ And I just took out my wallet and handed the Monsignore a pound note. ‘For your charities, Monsignore,’ I said, and he glanced back over his shoulder and said, ‘Wait a moment, Father. I think I hear his Eminence’s footstep. Perhaps he hasn’t retired yet. Do come in.’
“He showed me into a bloody enormous waiting room with folding doors, and he left me there for about five minutes. Suddenly the folding doors were thrown back and in came this wizened-looking old woman of a man and sat down in a big chair. I knelt and kissed his ring, and then I told him what I’d come for. He put on a sad air.
“‘But you see, Father,’ he said, ‘this convent is in a very remote area. The people are poor; they are rather simple- minded, and they have a great veneration for St. Brigid. I am afraid, Father, that if there were any question of interfering with the relic there would be danger of violence. In my position I cannot risk the possibility of riots and publicity. I am sure you wnll understand.’ ‘I understand, your Eminence,’ says I.
“And then the same idea crossed my mind, and I nearly laughed into the old ruffian’s face. ‘I’m not in my own diocese. There’s nothing whatever he can do to me.’ So I put my hand in my pocket and took out my wallet. Did you ever see a film called The Clutching Hand?”
“No.”
“Well, you should. Because it happened to me. Suddenly I saw The Clutching Hand reaching out for my wallet—like a bird’s claw with the long nails on it. Before I could take it out he had the five-pound note out of my fingers. ‘One moment, Father, and I’ll see what I can do,’ he said, and left the room. In another ten minutes back comes the greasy Monsignore with the written authority for me to break the thighbone of St. Brigid and bring it back to Ireland with me.”
And then, because he was proud of his Church, he gave me a dirty look and said, “You can say what you like about the Irish priests, but you couldn’t buy an Irish bishop for five pounds.”
But, of course, marriage was the greatest might-have-been of all, and on that he could talk for hours. Like most priests (and indeed lawyers and doctors) he had seen its shady side. When my own marriage (which he had opposed) broke up he stopped all traffic at a busy intersection to come out of his car and shout at me, “I told you she was too tough for you!” When he was telling me about some particularly sordid episode he had encountered in his parish he comforted himself with the usual seminary sour grapes. Once he told me about a parishioner who was convinced that his wife was trying to poison him, and another night about a man and wife who occupied separate rooms and communicated only by notes in the hallway.
“There’s marriage for you now!” he said with gloomy pride.
“Oh, for God’s sake, that isn’t marriage,” I replied.
“It could have happened exactly the same to me,” he said.
“It couldn’t,” I said. “It could happen only to someone who had the capacity for behaving like that. You haven’t.”
“What do you think I’d have done?” he asked, delighted to explore imaginatively that land that for him would forever be unknown.
“Nothing, probably,” I said. “You’d have been too busy, worrying about the kids.”
“You might be right there,” he said, scowling. “I often wonder what sort of father I’d have made.”
“You needn’t worry,” I said. “You’d have been a very good one, only a little bit too conscientious. You’d have fretted yourself into the grave about their marks at schooL”
“That was the way mother was with us,” he said.
He had had a peculiarly intense relationship with his mother, who, after his father’s death, had brought up and educated two fine sons entirely by her own efforts as a dressmaker and small shopkeeper. He was too clever not to have observed all her little foibles and vanities. He had been compelled to wear an Eton collar, which distinguished him from the toughs of the neighborhood, and he had not quite forgiven her that. She had had him trained to play the violin, and a neighboring shop-keeper with a son who was to be a priest had taken up the challenge and had her son taught to play the piano. As the other shop had a narrow stairway the piano had to be lifted by crane to an upper-story window, which had caused the Traynors great satisfaction.
But when he had to play at a convent concert, and the rival shopkeeper had arranged that his name would be omitted from the concert program, his mother had stalked out of the concert hall with Traynor at her heels and refused to allow him to play at all. (“And you were perfectly right, Mrs. Traynor,” as her friend among the nuns had told her.)
“Once, when I was at University College, Cork,” he said to me, “I made an excuse not to come home for the weekend. I pretended I had a lot of work to do, but really all I wanted was to get off with a couple of fellows for a weekend in Youghal. When we were walking along the Promenade, who do you think we met but mother? She’d got lonely at home and come down for a day excursion. When she saw me she smiled and bowed and said, ‘Good evening,’ and all I could do was to raise my hat. But, after that, she wouldn’t even let me talk about it. ‘Ah, you have no word!’ she said. Wasn’t that a terrible thing for her to say—’You have no word’?”
It was a phrase my mother used to me. “Word” meant “honor,” and I knew exactly how he felt.
At the same time he was too imaginative a man not to realize the full extent of her sacrifice for himself and his brother. When she died he felt it was his duty to read the Burial Service.
“Don’t do it, Tim,” another priest warned him. “You’ll only break down.”
But Traynor felt he owed this last duty to his mother. He didn’t even need to read the service: he loved the poetry so much that he knew it by heart and recited it to me, but the poetry was too much. After a few moments he burst into help- less sobbing, and his friend took the book from his hand and finished it for him.
All the imaginative improvisation was only the outward expression of a terrible inward loneliness, loneliness that was accentuated by his calling. In that sense only could I ever admit that he was not a good priest-he should have had a tougher hide. Priests in Ireland are cut off from ordinary intercourse in a way that seems unknown in other countries. Once when we were arguing he made me impatient and I said, “Ah, don’t be a bloody fool, Tim!” His face suddenly went mad and for a moment I thought he meant to strike me. Then he recollected himself and said darkly, “Do you know that nobody has called me a bloody fool since I was sixteen.” Then the humor of it struck him, and he described how, once, when he was home on holidays from the seminary he was pontificating at the supper table and suddenly caught his uncle winking at his mother. Then he grew angry again.
“People like you give the impression that it’s our fault if the country is priest-ridden. We know it’s priest-ridden, but what can we do about it? I can’t even get on a tram without some old man or woman getting up to offer me his seat. I can’t go into a living room without knowing that all ordinary conversation stops and when it starts again it’s going to be intended for my ears. That’s not a natural life. A man can’t be sane and not be called a bloody fool now and again.”
That, of course, was my function, though we both knew that his friendship with me was highly dangerous to him. One night after dark, when he was sitting with the other two curates on the sea front, I passed and he hailed me. Immediately, the others rose and strode off without an apology, while Traynor sat there, mad with chagrin, muttering, “Dirty, ignorant louts!”
Before I knew him he spent his holidays as a stretcher-bearer in Lourdes: somehow the contact with people who were ill or dying satisfied the gentleness and protectiveness in his nature. There was an enormous amount of this, but it never went on for long until he felt rebuffed, and brooding and anger took their place. In those years he took every chance of spending a few days in Gougane Barra in the mountains of West Cork. He stayed at the inn, abandoned his Roman collar and served at the bar, went fishing and argued with the visitors, and (if I knew him) got involved personally and vindictively in every minor disagreement for miles round. His loneliness was of a sort that made it difficult for him to become involved with anything except as a protagonist. Most of his evenings he spent with Tim Buckley, the Tailor, who had nicknamed him “The Saint.”
The Tailor was a very remarkable man, a crippled old man of natural genius with a wife as remarkable as himself. Ansty was thin, tragic, and sour; the Tailor was plump, wise, and sweet-tempered. He sat on a butter-box and blew the fire with his old hat, and carried on an unending dialogue with his wife about the fire, the cow, and the Cronins who kept the inn, but their real subject was always human life. He was one of the greatest talkers I have known, and if in the way of great talkers he did occasionally hold the floor too much it was never because he was self-assertive but because he had a sort of natural authority that asserted itself without assistance. He suffered from the fact that his cultural tradition was an oral, and hence a very fallible, one, so that faced with the unfamiliar it always rationalized, turnring everything to folklore. For instance, nothing could persuade him that the Boer general De Wet—one of the heroes of his youth—was not a County Cork man who had introduced himself to the black men with a Dia dhuit, the Gaelic “Good day,” and much of what he took for granted was of the same order of knowledge. But he knew almost all that was good in the oral tradition, and because he was a man of natural genius was never completely contained in it. Like Traynor himself, he overflowed.
Literally he was a man who did not know which century he lived in. He lived it intensely in his own as perceived from a little cottage above the mountain road to Gougane Barra, with Hitler, St. Patrick, and Danny Coholan, the Bishop of Cork, as strict contemporaries. His favorite song in English was “The Herring,” which Cecil Sharp collected also in the Appalachians, but any story or verse he quoted might be of the nineteenth or the fifteenth century, or, indeed, from the world of pre-history, and he used it all to serve his own Johnsonian purpose of commenting on the vagaries of human existence. When Ansty, his wife, tried to rouse him to a state of activity which he found unnatural, he blew the fire with his hat and commented on her folly in the words of Garlach Coileanach—”My mother was drowned a year ago; she’d have been round the lake since then”; and it was only after his death that it dawned on me that the Garlach Coileanach was only a corruption of Garlach Ioldhanach, the Youth of Many Arts, which is one of the ancient names for the Celtic god Lug who gave his name to such faraway places as Lyons and Laon. “Take Life easy and Life will take you easy,” he used to say.
I spent one delightful Christmas with Traynor in Gougane because I knew that he was feeling restless and lonely. There was no one else at the inn but a middle-aged lady who had known Sir Basil Zaharoff intimately from childhood and had come to spend a few days of perfect peace in the mountains. Traynor, who was gloomily convinced that she was havring us on or someone was having her on, had her luggage examined, and it contained two dance frocks that Ansty made great play of. “Jesus Christ!” she would mutter moumfully, returning from one of her excursions after the cow. “Two young strong men and no wan at all to give the poor woman a tickle!”
The Tailor knew that I was searching for a song called “Driving the Geese at Evening,” which was too broad for the local folklorists to record, and he had ordered down old Batty Kit from the hill to sing it for me. At the sight of Traynor Batty dried up; it was not only in the towns that the conversation changed when a priest came into the room. But the Tailor would have none of this.
“‘Tis a bit barbarous,” Batty said. “Even so, even so,” said the Tailor. “It wasn’t you who wrote or composed it.”
Actually, Batty was crazy to sing. He was a melomaniac, and in spite of his great age had a beautiful voice. He lay in wait for the children from the local national school to learn their latest songs, and it was extraordinary to hear that remarkable old man, whose sense of music and language was impeccable, imitating the metronomic beat and the synthetic accent that the school children had picked up-a horrifying example of what we do to ancient cultures when we try to revive them.
However, he did sing the song, and I got it down as well as I could while he interrupted me to point out some verbal felicity. The first verse begins, “One lovely evening at the yellowing of the sun,” and he stopped and cried, “There’s a beautiful phrase for you-‘the yellowing of the sun.’ There’s a cartload of meaning in that.”
I had brought whiskey, and the Tailor provided beer, and as we left Batty Kit threw his arms round my neck and sobbed, “Thanks be to God, Frinshias, we had one grand dirty night.”
As we went up the mountain road in the moonlight Traynor stopped and looked back.
“Now they’re beginning to talk about us,” he said darkly.
“Let them,” I said, but I knew that he was haunted by the thought that whenever he was not there life, in some unimaginably interesting way, was going on.
