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Blooming Marvellous

Sometime in the late 1990s, when I was staying in Dublin with my sister Marie Heaney and her husband Seamus, he was working on the introduction to a book called A Way of Life, Like Any Other, which I took to be a novel. I’d never heard of it, but the fact that Seamus was writing an introduction to this new edition seemed like an honour and signalled importance. First published in 1977, it had won both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the American PEN/Hemingway Award. How had I missed it?

Seamus gave me some pages of his introduction to read and I remember being much taken by the author’s use of the word ‘cleanly’ in a passage about acting as a carer for his father:

I had been nearly two years caring for my father and had some reason to be pleased with my work. His habits were again cleanly, his house and its treasures were in order . . .

It was so simple, yet it marked him out as someone at home with what the poet Eavan Boland called ‘that most fabulous of beasts, language’. The book’s title originated in a flippant remark Seamus had once made in a Czech restaurant, which was seized upon by the author who – of course, of course! – happened to be there. The whole situation was somehow reminiscent of one of Flann O’Brien’s delicious literary excursions poking fun at pretension. And appropriately the author’s name was Darcy O’Brien, a moniker given him by Marguerite Churchill, his movie-star mother (a fabulously crazed, joyfully wicked, sexy creation, who didn’t want anyone to think her son was common Irish. Jaysus, no.)

On New Year’s Eve 2001, the worst snowstorm in England and Ireland for years closed nearly all the airports, but somehow one flight took off from Dublin to Bristol with Seamus and Marie on it. They made it to my house through the snowy Mendips where

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Sometime in the late 1990s, when I was staying in Dublin with my sister Marie Heaney and her husband Seamus, he was working on the introduction to a book called A Way of Life, Like Any Other, which I took to be a novel. I’d never heard of it, but the fact that Seamus was writing an introduction to this new edition seemed like an honour and signalled importance. First published in 1977, it had won both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the American PEN/Hemingway Award. How had I missed it?

Seamus gave me some pages of his introduction to read and I remember being much taken by the author’s use of the word ‘cleanly’ in a passage about acting as a carer for his father:
I had been nearly two years caring for my father and had some reason to be pleased with my work. His habits were again cleanly, his house and its treasures were in order . . .
It was so simple, yet it marked him out as someone at home with what the poet Eavan Boland called ‘that most fabulous of beasts, language’. The book’s title originated in a flippant remark Seamus had once made in a Czech restaurant, which was seized upon by the author who – of course, of course! – happened to be there. The whole situation was somehow reminiscent of one of Flann O’Brien’s delicious literary excursions poking fun at pretension. And appropriately the author’s name was Darcy O’Brien, a moniker given him by Marguerite Churchill, his movie-star mother (a fabulously crazed, joyfully wicked, sexy creation, who didn’t want anyone to think her son was common Irish. Jaysus, no.) On New Year’s Eve 2001, the worst snowstorm in England and Ireland for years closed nearly all the airports, but somehow one flight took off from Dublin to Bristol with Seamus and Marie on it. They made it to my house through the snowy Mendips where the rest of my family were waiting and hoping, and then through the hazardously high drifts to St Michael’s church in Stinsford, Dorset, a place with special resonance for the Heaneys and for all of us because of our reverence for Thomas Hardy. We stood frozen amid the churchyard yews, wind howling, snow blasting down, as Seamus fulfilled a vow he had made years earlier to read aloud, over the poet’s grave, that most confounding of autobiographical poems ‘The Darkling Thrush’, which Hardy had written there exactly one hundred years before.
. . . An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small, In blast be-ruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom . . .
Later Seamus sent me a finished version of his introduction and a postcard with a watercolour of the graves of Hardy and his wives at St Michael’s church which read: ‘Polly – remembering your relish of the “cleanly” in Darcy’s prose, I make bold to send you a copy of the introduction I eventually wrote. They’ve not sent me any copy of the book yet, but if they supply me, I’ll forward one.’ They did supply soon after and he sent it to me, but I avoided reading it, I don’t know why. So years passed and Seamus died and broke our hearts, and after a while I took the book up and started to read.

*

From the first line – ‘I would not change the beginning for anything’– I was laughing and in love. From this rocket launch we’re propelled into the crazy realism of the world in which Darcy O’Brien grew up: Hollywood. His father George O’Brien had been a cowboy star of early cowboy movies and his mother ‘a goddess of the silver screen’ aka Marguerite Churchill, best remembered, if remembered at all, as John Wayne’s leading lady in The Big Trail. She, in all her terrible beauty and drunkenness, a mini-Sarah Bernhardt in her theatrics, is the epicentre of Darcy’s world, his scourge, his responsibility, his subject and source of love. This was not a novel, but then again, what was it? A sort of autobiography? A memoir? A fantasy? Whatever, it was in a class of its own and to use a catch-all word to describe it – picaresque, mercurial, cosmic, romantic, high-spirited (all true) – would limit its antic scope. ‘I would pay hard cash, silver dollars on the barrelhead as the cowboy star father would have put it, to have written that first page of Darcy’s first novel,’ said his mentor, the novelist and Professor of English Literature at Berkeley, Thomas Flanagan. Here is the opening paragraph:
I would not change the beginning for anything. I had an electric car, a starched white nanny, a pony, a bed modelled after that of Napoleon’s son, and I was baptized by the Archbishop of the diocese. I wore hats and sucked on a little pipe. I was the darling of the ranch, pleasing everyone. One day I was sunning myself in the patio, lying out on the yellow and blue tiles, contemplating the geraniums and sniffing the hot, clean air. A bee came up and stung me on my bare fanny. The response to my screams was wonderful. Servants everywhere, my mother giving orders. Don Enrique applied an old Indian remedy and my father took me down to the beach house to let the salt water do its work. Oh, what a world it was! Was there ever so pampered an ass as mine?
O’Brien has a unique voice. Well, that’s a given: writers have to have a unique voice. At times of course, given the subject – the coming of age, skipping disrespectfully towards a way of wisdom like any other – one hears Holden Caulfield mooching through the rye in the background, and James Joyce wittering away, but the final compact treasure chest that is this book is his alone. Not that he ever is. From childhood he is surrounded by the lunatic, wholly egocentric everyday society of Hollywood and he never misses a trick, that child ear of his attuned not just to audible nuance but to inaudible squeak. His observation and remembrance of his hysterical Californian upbringing, his appetite for the absurd, his cynicism, his wit, the sheer intelligence blasting along had me panting with pleasure alongside. His encounter as an almost innocent 14-year-old with a pair of young hookers bought and paid for by his stepfather to divest him of his virginity is a work of subtext art in itself.
‘Are you two related? You’re not sisters or anything?’ ‘No.’ ‘How did you meet? Did you know each other before?’ ‘There’s a guy we know,’ Dot said.
There are passages where one might be inclined to say, as they do in Ireland, that he loses the run of himself and goes a wee bit Molly Bloomish, but since these too are sly examples of his erudition and a channelling of his literary hero, they are cherries on the confection. A confection with a solid bitter base flavoured with poignant dolorous detail but always lightly handled – his father’s pained Catholicism, his mother’s appallingly intimate confidences. Her way of life might well have sent her son haywire and perhaps it did – but what a joy his tightrope act on the loose line of sanity is. Below lie unnameable hurts, but he doesn’t let us look down. The rapier work is in his dialogue. Here’s his mother confiding to her young son about his new stepfather, Anatole, a Russian creation with certain similarities to Ivan the Terrible.
‘He’s a pig,’ she said. ‘I think he has Tartar blood.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘He’s at me day and night. What does he expect?’ ‘It must be very difficult for you.’ ‘Difficult! The Whore of Babylon wouldn’t put up with it! I don’t know, dear, sometimes I think it’s all just plain screwing. I don’t think there’s any love in it. Not that he means harm, the poor thing. I don’t think he knows any better. He’s had nothing but whores his whole life.’
Anatole is a man who stands out in a crowd, a hundred and eighty-five pounds of east European muscle, a compact rhino of a man, and a sculptor to boot:
His Zeus assaulting Athene suggested far more than the obvious quest for union between the principles of creation and knowledge. The work achieved its effect of surprise and antic abandon through a single daring leap in construction; the goddess was five times the size of the father of the gods who, captured in the act of scrambling up the female buttocks, reflected in every straining sinew the desperation of a man who may have taken on a task too big for him.
When A Way of Life, Like Any Other – his first novel – was published in 1977, Darcy O’Brien was 28, already a professor at Pomona College in California, and author of three scholarly books – his doctoral thesis The Conscience of James Joyce, and monographs on the Irish poets W. R. Rodgers and Patrick Kavanagh. Later he became well-known for his award-winning true crime stories, among them The Power to Hurt, and Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers which became a bestseller, was made into a television film and is now a standard text on criminology and psychology courses. O’Brien’s interest in Ireland and Irish literature was aroused by Thomas Flanagan when he was a postgraduate student at Berkeley. It was Flanagan who showed him that his academic WASP background (Princeton and a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge) and his Irish heritage could be brought into creative alignment, and he began his annual pilgrimages to Ireland. I never met him and wish I had, but Seamus described him as tanned, seersuckered, elegantly shod and shoe-shined. ‘He’d arrive in Ireland every summer and move like a Californian Apollo through the bohemian kitchens of Dublin and Connemara.’ From 1978 to 1995 he was a popular Professor in the English Department at Tulsa University. He was only 58 when, crowned with awards, fellowships and honours, he died of a heart attack in 1998. Seamus never did quite make up his mind over whether A Way of Life, Like Any Other was an autobiographical novel or a fictionalized memoir, a cri de coeur or a comic turn – it was all of these things and more – a joy to read, what T. S. Eliot called ‘the complete consort dancing together’. And his introduction? A dazzling bonus, every sentence revealing Seamus’s sweet tooth for irony, wit, humour and language. ‘A jubilation, a ventriloquism, a writer figure-skating into his kingdom, his self-awareness, his release. Hollywood is there in all its crazy realism, autobiography is there in all its poignant detail, but what is chiefly present is a sense of the language performing in and for and through the writer.’ I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 67 © Polly Devlin 2020


About the contributor

Polly Devlin’s latest book is Writing Home, a sort of accidental memoir. She lives in London and sometimes teaches at Barnard College, Columbia University, in New York.

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