John McGahern - The Pornographer

“On the Shannon, I think.”

“Going in for mythological stuff as well? Compound everything. This won’t do. This won’t do at all. And now you’re off to London, modern style, the illegitimate father present at the birth. Very good.”

“There was a time I thought I’d have to marry the woman and stay here.”

“And why didn’t you, old boy? That’s how I got married — but I was in love. My wife was going to ditch me but then found she was pregnant and married me; then on our wedding night she discovered it was a false alarm, that she wasn’t pregnant at all. Afterwards we laboured and laboured in vain until she decided to go to the doctor. Whatever he did, whatever rearranging he did, I couldn’t hang up my trousers on the foot of the bed after that but she was away. There are lessons no doubt in all these things for those who care to observe them. Well, why didn’t you follow father’s good example, even in the eye of rejection, to the altar?”

“It was luckily decided that it wasn’t a very good idea. Since I was only willing to marry her in order to leave her.”

We moved from the bar to the restaurant. The wine waiter had a crest of embroidered grapes on his jacket. Maloney gave him a severe inspection as he took the wine list, but it had much the same effect as that of a tailor appraising a potential customer for a new suit, and it ended with the waiter choosing the wines.

“There’s no disaster in life that can’t be turned to someone’s advantage,” he was irrepressible. “Martin Luther King, you may remember, had a dream. I just have a plan but we’ll fill the inner man while I outline it.”

We had avocado with prawns, lamb cutlets with spinach, and cheese. The waiter picked a Château Margaux and Maloney ordered a second bottle to go with the cheese before we finished the first. Afterwards he insisted on moving back to the bar for brandies.

“You may remember in the Echo days when Maureen Doherty ditched me and I wrote that poem,” he began.

“How could I forget it?”

“I was undismayed. I’ve always been undismayed. Many women have ditched me but I knew sooner or later one of them would leave it too late and get caught jumping out of the house shouting Fire! It’s exactly of course what happened. And then after one of those rows with that fool Kelly down at the Echo I was even a bigger bloody fool and handed in my notice. Kelly accepted it with alacrity and I went off to Paris to be a poet. That cured me. A black man said to me that Paris was the one place where there was no racial discrimination, that everybody got treated equally badly there. I lived in a garret, of course, off the rue Buci. There were three hundred and sixty-nine steps up to it, the wood worn away in the centre of the steps. That’s what you mean by centuries of feet. The bloody house was built by Henry the Fourth in 1603. The windows were in the roof, glass in blacksmith’s frames. I stuffed the frames with newspaper to keep the draughts out. Very cold days were spent in cafés with a book and a beer and coffee, the waiters clearing the table and trying to rout you out of it every hour or so; but you could look out through the glass at the rain and people passing and the red flop of the canvas and the deer and partridges hung across in the game butchers — and — have visions. My most frequent vision was that of an enormous tray of roast beef and browned potatoes back in Ireland. In hot weather the garret was like a glasshouse. Couldn’t live in it then either. I used to go and sit in the Luxembourg. How well I remember the trained pears in their plastic bags. I have so many heart-shaking memories. Life is a great teacher if you can extricate yourself for a few moments every few years or so from the middle of its great bog.

“It was in the Luxembourg I got my plan. I used to hate the Parisian brats, going for rides on the ponies round the fountain, the overalled little man coming behind with the litter cart on bicycle wheels, cleaning up the pony shit off the sacred gravel. Then they put up a notice. Only old people or people with children were to be allowed into the park. That finally pissed me off with Paris and poetry and I swore never to return except with my plan.

“I had almost given it up entirely but your lechery may have saved the day. This is it. I’ll get a pram made in the shape of a coffin, miniature handles, crucifix, brown varnish, the lid at an angle of forty-five degrees to keep out the rain, a white handgrip for pushing, big wheels and small wheels.

“You’ll go to London, and see the baby off the assembly line like any modern father. The three of us — why, the four of us — will go to Paris, put the baby into the morality play of a pram, and go for our evening stroll in the gardens. Isn’t that a stroke of genius? Of course I’ll pay for the party. Or the firm will. At one go I’ll be going back to Paris, putting my plan into action, and keeping my word. Isn’t the whole idea a poem in itself, a mobile poem, a life poem, an action poem?” In his excitement he slapped me on the back.

“I thought your Echo days were done with.”

“I have no talent for writing. You know that. My talent is for management. It’d drive them mad to be confronted with the logical end of the activity, all these fat smug Parisian pigeons standing around and sitting at cafés. They’ll be incensed. They’ll turn on us in a fury. We’ll be in all the newspapers.”

“Maybe they’d only smile? Or it could become the new fashion in prams.”

“It’d be striking too near the roots for that. It’d be too close to reality for that. Reality is a great stick for beating the people. They can’t stand it, we’re told, but everybody appears very vague about what it is.”

“It’d be closer to a farce, if you ask me, which is exactly what the woman would call it. She’d never agree to it.”

“But I’d pay for it. We’d have a week in Paris as well. We’d eat in the Coupole. We’d go to the Closerie des Lilas. We’d blow it at Lipp’s and the Vendôme.”

“She’d never agree to it, you can be sure. That’s how I got into this fucking position in the first place. She’d say it was turning the whole thing into a farce, that it wasn’t natural, that it wasn’t the way life should be. If she wouldn’t agree to putting a nosebag on the old penis she’d hardly agree to putting the baby in the coffin.” And he was quiet. He took a pickled onion from the counter, showed all his front teeth, cut it in two, ostentatiously chewed it, and then washed it down with a big swallow of brandy.

“Well, old boy, you’re crusading off to London, then. You’ll be in illegitimate attendance while another white hope of the human race comes squawking into the world. And in the meantime you’ll forward me your artistic endeavours.”

“If that’s all right with you.”

“Perfectly all right. Even Queen Victoria saw that the artist could move at ease in all levels of society, and thereby endanger the whole social structure.”

“It’s very good of you.”

“Forget it, old boy. If she could do nothing about it, neither I’m sure can I, though I’m a queen of sorts too. And since I can’t have my Paris idea I want the Shannon written up, and written up well. I’ll pay well over the odds for it. You’ll need the money in London. I wouldn’t mind spending a few months in London myself, watching over a future clown flashing out into the world,” he said dreamily.

“You mean Mavis and the Colonel on the Shannon?”

“What else?” he almost roared. “Do you think my readers would want an account of two incompetent nincompoops like yourself and this fool of a woman? My readers want icing and sugar, not loaves of bread. And be careful not to let life in. Life for art is about as healthy as fresh air is for a deep-sea diver.”