Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

as Rodin’s La Pensée .
    I travelled. I saw the pearwood Virgin in Chartres Cathedral, the statuette of Philosophus outside it again; I visited Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, to which the black Madonna was borne on a cloud of red sand, in a house or stone coffin, with the other two Maries. I saw a Spanish Mercheros Gypsies’ encampment, just like a painting by Van Gogh, by a necropolis and young blonde German Jenisch Gypsies in wingtip shoes in cafés where the jukeboxes played Schlagermusik sung by Czech Vlachs Gypsies.
    My little friends were Gauguin’s naked Breton Boy , strong black lines separating his body from the grass he’s lying on; Van Gogh’s night-time café in Arles, which he painted with candles in his hat; Vermeer’s View of Delft .
    Ailve had told me the story.
    Proust thought View of Delft , which he saw as a young man, the most beautiful painting in the world. A few years before he died there was a Vermeer exhibition at the Jeu de Paume. He temporarily collapsed before going to it. There he saw View of Delft again and still thought it the most beautiful painting in the world.
    Another of her stories had been about the Liberator’s poetess aunt Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill who married Art Ó Laoghaire, a young captain in the Hungarian Hussars and lived with him near Mac-room, west Cork.
    Art had a bitter quarrel with Abraham Morris, the high sheriff, and was shot dead by Morris’s bodyguard.
    When Art’s sister arrived from Cork city for the wake she was outraged to find Eibhlín in bed, that she wasn’t mourning sufficiently.
    The accusation of not mourning enough was always being flung at me.
    It was flung once more at me when most of the members of the Miami Showband, which Ailve regularly danced to, were murdered on their way back from a country-and-western night near Newry, County Down.
    When Sandy Denny—wind-blown blonde hair, sunburst jellabas—who sang songs as old as Chaucer’s ‘Poor Person’ or Blind Mary’s father John Bunyan, died as a result of falling down a stairs, I heard that Ailve, after a brief career as an actress in Dublin, had married a politician.
    In her brief career as an actress in a cul-de-sac theatre, she’d played Beatrice in Stendhal’s play The Cenci , about an Italian count who raped his daughter; she in turn tortured and murdered for her part in his murder. It was in this role, for which she won considerable acclaim, that Ailve caught the politician’s attention.
    Some years later I visited her in Galway.
    A pathway led to a white house that was identical to the illimitable miles of white houses that swept around me.
    In an exercise suit patterned with palm leaves, blue canvas beach shoes, hair with long fringe now, Ailve answered the door, half-fearfully, her face sunken in.
    When Queen Elizabeth, who receives a sprig of thorn each Easter from Glastonbury where the Irish monks used to venerate Patrick, visited the dying Duke of Windsor in Paris, and there was a Georges de la Tour exhibition in the Orangerie des Tuileries, which did for de la Tour, not overlooked by Ailve’s Proust, what an exhibition in Milan in 1951 did for Caravaggio, she had returned to Paris as she suggested she might but found the streets forever led back to a street in Kerry where there were Holy Communion dresses in full blossom in one shop window, which always had messages about lost keys.
    When you see life through a maze of fifteen thousand novels, you must get a queer impression of things and see them from an odd angle, Flaubert’s cousin Guy de Maupassant said.
    The fifteen thousand novels had led us both to fifteen thousand suburban houses.
    Ailve showed me in.
    Black flags had been flying in County Mayo, which I’d just returned from, for the recent H-Block deaths, as they’d flown throughout Ireland early in 1957 for Seán South from Henry Street, Limerick, and Feargal O’Hanlon from Monaghan town, killed during an attack on a police barracks in County Fermanagh, and the country-and-western voice of Louise Corrigan, from Bansha, County Tipperary, where a girl was tortured to death as a witch at the end of the nineteenth century, sounded from every café.
    On Ailve’s Laura Ashley wallpaper was a reproduction of the Belfast artist Paul Henry’s painting of the two Umhall mountains in County Mayo, with Knockmore on Clare Island to the west.
    When the French landed in Killala in County Mayo in 1798, a County Mayo landlord’s son was declared president of the republic