Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Come on, Aeney.

But Aeney was elsewhere, and after four months of waiting Mam had me write a letter of enquiry.

‘We want something polite but firm,’ she said. ‘Maybe they need a slight push. We want to know if they are interested or if we should offer the book elsewhere.’

I wrote it neatly on blue letter paper. Or we shall send the book elsewhere. Mam signed it. When she put it in the envelope the flap wouldn’t stick. We never sent letters. The envelope was probably ten years old. She put it under The Return of the Native and pressed down. But still the glue wouldn’t hold.

Sometimes you have to defy the signs. ‘Go down to Mac’s and see if they have an envelope.’

Moira Mac was doing what she always did in this life, washing clothes. She had no envelopes, but took a Holy Communion card out of its white one and gave me that. I brought it back inside my cardigan. At the kitchen table I addressed it. ‘Say a prayer,’ Mam said.

The more you hope the more you hurt.

You drop a letter in a Holy Communion envelope in the postbox and already you are waiting for a reply. Human beings were built for response. But human nature can’t tolerate too much waiting. Between the emotion and the response falls the shadow, T.S. Eliot said, and that was the principle that inspired texting, that came up with the shortest possible time, basically as fast as Sheila Geary’s two thumbs could hammer ILY on a tiny keyboard and get Johnny Johnston’s ILY2 back, so that between emotion and response now there wasn’t all that much shadow.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are.

After the Yeats classes my father returned to writing. He had been renewed. A white electric urgency flashed in him. For the first time he broke his own rule about only writing after the work on the farm was done, and now he was at his desk when I woke and there again when I came home and there when I went to not-sleep at night. It was a flood of new work. It was pouring into and out of him quickly, swift turbulent river. His pencil dashed across the paper now, worked itself down to a soft stub. When the lines were blurry as if underwater the pencil was quickly pared, soft whoo-whoo , the parings blown, and the writing raced on.

‘Dad?’

Inside the hum he couldn’t hear me.

‘Dad, Mam says dinner’s ready.’

He wrote faster than I had ever seen anyone.

‘Dad?’

I broke the hum. He fell silent, and at last pulled back out of the poem, pencil still in his hand. I had the sense of his unplugging, and that it was both arduous and somehow regretful.

‘Yes?’ he said. Then again, ‘Yes.’ As if recollecting that Mam and I and dinner existed.

He ate little, and to remedy this Mam tried various stratagems, cooking his favourite, salmon of course, buttered & honeyed carrots with peas and potatoes, telling me a clean plate was the best way of thanking her, or announcing that she had ruined the dinner and was sorry that it was probably inedible, just to make him feel I must try this for Mary .

By the end of the week Mam decided it was best to keep a plate in the oven. He would come down when he was ready. We shouldn’t disturb him. My mother has a natural kind of grace, which is basically wisdom.

Many plates of charred food were taken from the oven, but I never heard her complain.

We were still waiting for the reply from London, but now it seemed less vital. Aeney had done it, I decided. He’d gotten the poems turned on and now they were coming in a way that did not seem humanly possible. My father was not wrestling with these. Even though I was not getting to read them, I knew. I knew from the moments of goodnight when I stood behind him waiting for his kiss on my forehead, when I watched him, humming and rocking, pencil flashing across the page, I knew that these were different, these were his life’s work. He still crossed out, wrote a line and rewrote it, sounding it that way he had where the sound and rhythm were present but you could not make out the words. He still turned the page fast and began on a fresh one.

But now there was joy in it.

As I have said, I’ve read every book I can find about poetry, how it’s made and why it’s made and what it means that men and women write it. I’ve read T. S. Eliot’s On Poetry and Poets (Book 3,012, Faber & Faber, London), Poems of John Clare’s Madness (Book 3,013, Geoffrey Grigson ed., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), Robert Lowell: A Biography (Book 3,014, Ian Hamilton, Faber & Faber, London), Jeremy Reed’s Madness, the Price of Poetry (Book 3,015, Peter Owen, London), and the basic message is, poets are different to you and me. Poets do not escape into other worlds, they go deeper into this one. And because depths are terrifying, there is a price.

The price at first was thinness. My father forgot food. In a different biography it is here that he would turn to drink. It is here he might have considered recourse to the methods of Johnny Masters who started drinking early in the day so that by evening the world became tolerable. But because at Paddy Brogan’s wedding my father had drunk a glass of whiskey and shortly after thought people were trees, he knew drink would take him away and not towards the thing he wanted to capture.

He grew thin. His arms grew longer. Inside the open collar of his white shirt there were ropes and cords of tendons in his neck. His shoulders were sharp and made of the shirt a sail.

I do not mean to say he ignored us. Certainly he did not intend to, and there were moments when, like discovering a butterfly on the back of your hand, he stopped in the kitchen, looked at me the way no one else ever did. It was a look that loaned you some of what he was seeing, a look that made you feel, I don’t know, transfigured.

‘Hey, Ruthie.’ He swept me into his embrace. I pressed myself into that shirt and held on and for those moments forgave what I didn’t yet know would need forgiveness.

There were other times, times the suddenness in him took my hand and my mother’s hand and brought us out into the garden where the rain that was not called rain was falling softly and where he said, ‘I will make things better for us,’ and Mam said, ‘We are fine, Virgil, we are fine.’ A time when he let out a roar upstairs and came bounding down and clapped his hands hard. One clap , like that. Then another, louder, CLAP , so that even Nan looked, and I said, ‘Are you done?’ And he smiled and his eyes were shining the way eyes only shine in love-stories and he shook his head and he laughed. He had to catch the laugh with his hand, and then he touched the top of my head. ‘I am going to make things better for us, Ruthie,’ he told me, and went back up the stairs again and soon was humming once more.

We had an engine, a dynamo in our house, and its output was pages and pages of poems. A week passed, then another, and another. He was still writing, and writing it seemed was not the vexing toil it was when I tried to compose my promised poem, but a wildly improbable fizz. It was giddy and swift and surprising. It was plugged in and all-powerful, a blind mad rush that came not linear nor logical nor even reasonable but with the unruly irrepressible quality of life in it, the kind of writing Gabriel García Márquez meant when he said the sheer pleasure of it may be the human condition which most resembles levitation.

And our house rose with it.

How could it not? For a time our house left behind the ordinary world. I had only a vague sense that in the news the country was actually sinking. Greece had already sunk. Spain was sinking, so was Portugal. Whole bits of Europe were returning to seaweed. Our country was on what Margaret Crowe called tender hooks, waiting to see if we’d have a Soft Landing. We would, said the Ministers, just before we didn’t. But really I didn’t notice. The economy, like fine weather, was something that happened in Dublin. Honestly, until the Poles left, I didn’t know we had one. Gradually the Lidl and Aldi bags were coming (Mrs Prendergast called them Ly-dell and All-dee), and the croissants were departing. Shops were closing. In Ryan’s Tommy McCarroll said he’d put his money in the Absolute Idiots Bank and now felt like an absolute idiot. Francie Arthur’s fifty-euro notes started smelling like mattress, and then the Maguires were gone to tile Australia, Pat and Seamus and Sean Walsh to dig holes in Canada, Mona Murphy was selling her furniture in her front garden and Johnny Doyle at Doyle’s Auctioneers was like Young Blight in Our Mutual Friend , who, to create an impression of industry, spent his days filling his appointment book with made-up names, Mr Aggs, Baggs, Caggs and yes, let me see, at two sharp, Mr Daggs.