Arts and Letters

When I was young I would sometimes practice bibliomancy: divination by opening the Bible at random and, without looking letting my forefinger choose a verse or two. This occurred to me day before yesterday when I took Padraic's novel, The Flying Swans, down from the shelf, not having read it since its publication in 1957, and my eye fell upon this sentence: "Outside, before the door, a little cat was standing, her fur raised around her; because she was there as if the house belonged to her, she appeared little: one was surprised that so small a creature should have so large a possession."

In this I found a pattern, or rather as it were a ribbon on a string, to hold together certain slight remembrances and wandering thoughts in his honor: smallness and goodness as characteristics of one invaluable kind of poetry, not altogether favorable to the career of the small, good poet.

He was precocious. Not long ago, here in this Academy room, I heard him say that he had had a play performed in Dublin in 1901. Thinking out loud, remembering out loud, I remarked, "Evil Nietzsche died in his madhouse that same year, didn't he? And I the while was in my mother's womb." "Were you now?" exclaimed Padraic, amused. "Well, it wasn't my first play, you know."

Unless you have seen an early portrait of him—that painted by Yeats's father in the year of his first and perhaps loveliest volume of verse, 1907, is unforgettable—you may not have stopped to think how beautiful he was in his twenties. In later life his attitude toward the aging process—and there is a meaning for this in Roman Catholic tradition—was not to care about it one way or the other, to be durable rather than to seem young, priding himself more and more preponderantly on the inner self, mind over matter. Matter enough in 1907: a slender figure leaning forward in his chair over clasped hands, tapering fingers interlocked. He had a crescent moustache like Mark Spitz's; dark almond-shaped eyes with a sidelong glance; a lock of hair mingling with the shadow over the left eye.

There were giant competitors in and around Dublin at that time: Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, George Moore, Joyce; but he appears not to have minded or even to have noticed. He was more versatile than any of them. Versatility is not always a strength. Surely, when he married and came to this country before World War I, it was his salvation. Dining with James Joyce and his wife, one night in the early thirties, he happened to mention having published two or three books recently, and plenty of magazine articles also; and there was a play in prospect. Imperious, sometimes nagging Nora Joyce wondered why Jim couldn't publish more. "The most famous writer in Europe," and so little to show for it!

Upon which Padraic, as in defense of the author of Ulysses—then only halfway through the unparalleled labor of Finnegan's Wake, with another eight years' work to go—retold a fable of his schooldays in the midlands of Ireland. Several small animals foregathered to study what to do when the hounds came after them. The hare planned to take to his heels in several directions at once, jumping and zigzagging; the fox had in mind all sorts of tricks and pretenses; and what about the cat? The cat had only one idea, and "If that doesn't work," it meowed, "I am a dead cat." Suddenly there appeared the terrible dogs with bell-voices and fatal teeth and destroyed the hare and the fox and all the rest, all except the cat. Its one idea was to scramble to the top of a tree and to stay there. Said Padraic, knowing full well that he himself was the least cat-like of men, "The moral is: It is better to have one good trick than a dozen poor ones." Joyce doubtless relished this bit of bestiary but said nothing, probably fearing the challenge to his Nora.

Irishness personified, what pleasure he gave a lot of us, both in his isle of origin and in his adopted continent. And all of his pleasure was fraught with cultivation and philosophy, religious and otherwise. His native and natural, if not effortless, Catholicism counted for him always, though infrequently serving as subject matter. And there was balm in it, there was fondness, even for his infidel friends and for his pupils, whether teen-agers at school or great ladies in their salons, and for his perceptive readers.

In 1943 (I think) we were vacationing at the Woods Hole house of Mrs. W. Murray Crane, his most helpful and helped friend; Somerset Maugham was there with us. We had been walking around Penzance Point in a chilly fog, and drew close to the tea-tray, Maugham listening to our hostess; Padraic and I with our backs to the fire. The theme of individual immortality happened to come up between Padraic and me, and whereas he stated his belief as though it were the plainest part of the catechism, I expressed myself in several of my fluent sentences. Not simply an infidel, but a Protestant one, and an American one, I was (and am) willing to believe anything at all in the pantheistic way. "A stone in the road underfoot can be said to have been immortal for a million years, can it not?"

I expected Padraic to laugh at me in his gentle way, but then Maugham stood up, exasperated. "Do you two really believe what you are saying?" he cried out, with his almost snarling stammer. "I believe that after one's death one is as dead as a dog."

I have never forgotten the excitement in Padraic's face at that moment, surprise and respectfulness of course, but with a veritable passion of disagreement, and prevailing even over that, compassion. He instantly changed the subject for the famous fiction-writer's sake, and cared no more for me all the rest of that evening. Indeed, despite my irreligion, and philosophy like a lot of fairy tales, I was one of those sheep which safely lie in the shadow of the fold. Maugham, on the other hand, was solitary, astray in his black grief, his unwilling heterodoxy, needing help. Padraic understood things like that.

He prided himself on having known the old rural Ireland where books were rare, and lamps rarer still, and the firelight never flaming enough to read by, where this vacuum of the mind was filled by itinerant reciters of ancient Gaelic epics, by tellers of tales, and by ballad singers, as at the start of civilization. Padraic had committed to memory a greater quantity of poems of all sorts than anyone I have ever encountered.

One evening Maugham invited the Colums and me with two or three other friends to dine in his hotel apartment in New York—entrancing sociability. The author of Of Human Bondage had been rereading Les Fleurs du Mal, and having gone to school in Paris as a boy, boasted a little of his French accent and elocution. We insisted on his reading to us six or eight of the more famous poems; and Padraic requested some that had been translated by Swinburne and other virtuosi of the nineties (I forget which), and dredged up those versions from his great memory, pausing now and then to correct a word and repeating that line as it should be. His wife Mary, whom he called Mollie, better educated than he or me or Maugham—therefore not to be outdone—asked for some that never had been put in English and, taking the book from Maugham, gave us good prose versions of them at sight. Maugham concluded with Baudelaire's daydream of a life alongside a young giantess, clambering up the steep slope of her immense knees, nonchalantly napping in the shadow of her mountainous breasts. Interrupting himself, the often melancholy Englishman called it the foolishest poem ever written, and laughed so that he had to begin all over again. "Give it to me," said austere Mollie; then blushed so that she couldn't translate.

My anecdotes of Padraic are thin, I must admit, despite long years of friendship and a better than average memory. I hope that someone is at work on a biography; it had better not be one of us, but a practitioner or perhaps two practitioners of the new journalism, schematically setting out to probe the mysteries, paying microscopic attention to the texts, thirty or forty titles, reading between the lines, including hypotheses and legendry.

It is my supposition that there was only one real piece of plot in Padraic's life: the marriage to Mollie, his "sweetheart and comrade," as he called her in the dedication to the Collected Poems. The last time she called on Yeats, he told her, "When we first met, you looked to me like a beautiful young anarchist." She had had fiery blond hair, what is called Titian blond, but in my time it gradually turned ashen. For half a century Padraic cherished her, served her, took her seriously, with never a quibble or a lapse.

Another of the great Styx-crossers of 1972, Ezra Pound, in one of his fabulous name-dropping Cantos composed in the wooden army-cage in Pisa, obscurely juxtaposing dead Mussolini upside down with dead Yeats—“the problem after any revolution is what to do with your gunmen”—also brought Padraic into it chastisingly. "O woman shapely as a swan!" he quoted, perhaps intending to fuse or confuse Maud Gonne with Mollie: "Your gunmen tread on my dreams." Specializing in scorn, the cantoist concluded, "Why didn't he [Padraic Colum] keep on writing poetry at that voltage?"

"Voltage" would not seem to have been the word for Padraic at any stage of his poetical output. The "woman shapely," a masterwork only six quatrains long, is (I believe) only a translation. Why do I say only? Yeats and Pound and (almost as great) Waley, and a number of Americans, e.g., the newest of our academicians, Richard Wilbur, have taught us better. The theme is a man's sense of the destructive powers inherent in extreme romantic love, the dangerousness of females. A good many simplicities like this lie in every language; the collective mind inherits them to a greater degree than we experience them individually. In the hand of the routine translator they bleach away like invisible ink.

What marvelous epithets Padraic has clothed the fearsome, eternal girl with!—blossom teeth, flowing limbs, shining throat, and her flesh between ribs and hips like foam. Notwithstanding which the loving man defied her: "The men you've slain were a trivial clan."

In a cunning house hard reared was I.
On your account I shall not die.

It occurs to me this translation may have been made before Mollie's time. No matter; many a poet has characterized his beloved-to-be before knowing her, with sweet premonition, as it were an advertisement in the personal column of an imaginary and noble newspaper.

A thought at the end, beginning contritely: ought I to have examined the work at greater length; forgotten the man, who never gossiped and occasioned little or no narrative chat? I think not. There are poetical writers who need to be taken as a unit, verse and prose, realistic novel and folklore, essay and drama, and by the same token, the personal fate and the remembrance. Padraic is typical of them; the whole is greater than the parts. There is no mystery in his work; the mystery was in him, is now in our bereavement; and its names are love, humility, and almost priestly advocacy of literature every day of his life, and longevity, with uncomplaining patience. Evidently, in his case, poetry is more than the craft, the product, the printable and reprintable excellence. There is also an inner vocabulary of which no dictionary is capable; soul that wouldn't be in mankind at all were it not for successive vocations of poets great and small; a dedication and a yearning unattainable as it were a handful of little flames to be divided up and passed on, for future uses.