Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Virgil walked the rhythm the river gave him. Over and back. Back and over. Lips pressed shut now, brow like a white slab, eyes watery and in a way unseeing. And now he was tapping. Three fingers of his right hand against his thigh, da-dumda dumda dum dum-da . The ground softened and mucked under the weight of the not-yet-poem, was printed and overprinted, boot-marks rising little ridges, small dark river waves, as he tramped and hummed and heard the hum turn into a first phrase.

He had something.

Was it wonderful? Was it like the moment the fishing line tautens in the stream and what was slack becomes a clean and perfect angle of intercourse? Was there that same electric flash of feeling, a zap ! eye-startle, muscle-tension, torsion of body to river? Did the urgency and unsettledness and rapture crash-combine, did his whole spirit cry out? Did he think yes, here, I have one!

And was it wonderful?

Well, at the time I was one hour and twenty minutes on the planet and mostly concerned with figuring out how there was two of me. But in the coverless edition of The Compleat Angler (Book 900, Chatto & Windus, London) that smells not so much of fish but certainly of yearning, Izaak Walton says angling is just like poetry, and so that’s how I picture it. He had one.

I’ve read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they’re all do-lally and they’re all different. There’s Gerard Manley Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I’m-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. Philip Larkin, writing from Belfast to his Dearest of Burrow-dwellers , My Dear Bunny, told how he bought a shilling’s-worth of mistletoe and was walking home with it to his flat, feeling jolly and like the reformed Scrooge, then noticed that the dark-coated, to-the-chin-buttoned, people of Belfast were all staring at him, the Blossom Carrier, as if they expected at any moment he might erotically explode.

They are a parish of peculiars, poets. But they all generally agree, a poem is a precarious thing. It is almost never landed clean and whole in one go. Virgil had a bite, one phrase, that’s all. But he wouldn’t let it go, and because poetry is basically where seeing meets sound, he said the phrase aloud now. He said it aloud and tramped it along the riverbank, said it again the moment he finished saying it and found in repetition was solace of a kind. In the dull consistency of the beat was that universal comfort babies know and people forget. He teased the line, waiting for the next movement. When it didn’t come he said the first line over. He didn’t give up. The sensation was so new and in it the certainty that this was something that he kept at it, and was still crossing over and back on the mucked strip beside the river when Father Tipp came looking for him in order to arrange the date for the baptisms.

Father Tipp was glad to see my father was praying. He heard the murmuring on the breeze, saw the head-bent pacing, and was consoled that though Virgil Swain was not a frequenter of his church fatherhood had now returned him to God. This would make easier the task that had troubled him in our kitchen, namely how to save Aeney and my souls before his annual holiday home to Tipperary.

Not knowing the fields Father Tipp missed the track, crossed Ryan’s not Mac’s, and so laboured through muck and plop, waving an arm at my father that he might see him and shorten the journey. But Virgil saw nothing, so absorbed was he in his prayers, and Father Tipp had to carry on, neat black Clarks size sevens having a little brown baptism of their own and the heat of his effort bringing the midges.

‘Hello? Hello there?’

He did another big drowning-man wave, smacked too late the first triple bites on his forehead.

‘Virgil? Hello?’

Still my father didn’t see or hear him. By the time Father Tipp crossed the loose rusting wire on random sticks the Ryans favoured as fencing, catching his inner trouser leg a twang, he could hear the praying and thought what he was seeing was Pentecostal.

Father Tipp was still young then, Shock and Awe still belonged to the vocabulary of the cloth and the Church was not yet in the toilet as Sean Mathews said. He was still inclined towards the miraculous, and came along the bank believing he was seeing what in fact he believed. Or believed that he believed. It’s a vicious circle.

‘Virgil?’

My father didn’t stop. He kept on, pacing and repeating, pacing and repeating, until, with a purple flush of authority, Father T stepped at last into the way of the poem. ‘A word?’ he said, hands behind his back, eyebrows up and face pinched, more or less exactly the way Timothy Moynihan did in Faha Hall when he was playing the Vicar in that English farce and Susan Brady opened the door with her knickers in her hand.

Father Tipp realised in an instant the awfulness of his intrusion, knew when he saw my father’s eyes flash, Virgil stopping sharp, falling silent. There was a moment of acute diffidence, as though they were high-standing bishops of different flocks. Because by then he knew that what he had heard was not after all a prayer.

‘Father.’

Briefly the priest considered his shoes, and the moment he did the toes of them lifted slightly from the suck muck and his heart fell. West Clare was just not Tipperary. ‘I was wondering if I might have a word?’

‘Yes, Father?’ My father looked dazed.

Father Tipp compensated for self-consciousness by bubbling. ‘Well, isn’t it marvellous? It is. Marvellous now. Twins. You had no idea, I’m told? No. No but marvellous now.’ A penance of midges came to his brow. He went after them with a white linen handkerchief. ‘Warm, isn’t it? Close. Terribly close.’

The two men stood and considered the closeness. ‘Not good this time of year the farmers tell me,’ Father Tipp said, and ran a finger round the inside of his collar.

Silently my father was repeating the phrases of the poem just departing.

‘Not that I understand why exactly,’ the priest said. He kept the hanky handy. Father Tipp was and still is a man skilled in the art of avoidance, black-belt level at the cryptic, but the heat of what he had to propose was making a glistening Here Midges landing strip of his forehead. ‘They’re not like this in Tipperary,’ he said and dabbed, letting the sorrow of his exile air before chancing a first proper glance at my father. ‘Momentous day for you. Of course it is. Of course it is.’ He watched the river run. ‘Yes.’ The midges took a moment to regroup. This time they came to his moisture moustache. He flicked the hanky at the air as if giving a kind of general dispensation.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I’ll be off. Just wanted to say my congratulations.’ He didn’t risk a handshake, but turned, took three steps and shot one hand upwards so his departing benediction was backwards. ‘God bless.’

He got five yards down the bank when he stopped, shook his head in this performance of contrariness, and turned back. ‘I nearly forgot,’ he said. ‘The baptisms?’

‘What?’

‘I’m actually away week after this. How will we? I wonder. No. Could we maybe? No. No no. I suppose not. Only. .’ A black diary had appeared in his hand. ‘We couldn’t. .?’