Saturday, September 22, 2018

MICHEL DÉON CASTS A COOL FRENCH EYE

This piece first appeared in the Irish Literary Supplement, Volume 38, Number 1 (Fall 2018), 12-13.

The primary claim to fame of Michel Déon as an “Irish” writer rests on a novel set in Ireland that he published in French in 1973.  Never translated into English, Un Taxi Mauve, which received the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, was adapted to the big screen in English in 1977 as The Purple Taxi.  (It did not receive rave reviews.)  Born in Paris in 1919, Déon was a prolific author in French beginning in the 1940s and the recipient of major literary honors, including membership in l’Académie française. After first settling on the Greek island of Spetsai in the Aegean Sea, Déon and his wife and their two children relocated to Ireland, specifically to south County Galway, in 1968.  He died in Galway in December of 2016 at the age of 97.

Reportedly, Déon lived just long enough to see in print an advance copy of Horseman, pass by!, a gathering of his nonfiction writing about Ireland translated by Clíona Ní Ríordáin, a professor of English at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, where she teaches literature and translation studies.  Originally published as Cavalier, passé ton cheminby Gallimard in 2005, this book comprises a dozen chapters populated by a cast of characters mostly local to his adopted and adoptive village of Tynagh, by the ghost of William Butler Yeats, and by a couple of fellow literary figures whose renown both precedes and exceeds Déon’s sketches of them.  Those two figures are Ulick O’Connor and John McGahern.

Remarkably, given Déon’s initial impression of the mercurial O’Connor, the two men developed an “episodic” friendship and even collaborated casually.  Déon’s first encounter with O’Connor, at the Shelburne Hotel in Dublin in the company of a dozen writers, was hardly auspicious, the pugnacious Dubliner having just given the boot to a British writer in the entourage: “I’m going to kick that hoor of an Englishman up the arse, if he doesn’t leave this instant.  What is he doing in my country?”  But eventually Déon came to appreciate him in all his motley complexity: “In our far-west Irish retreat his coming always leaves a mixed impression.  No one could fail to be impressed by his moral standards, his hard-hitting intelligence, and his rich poetic memory.  He arrives in the garb of a city-dweller, elegant after his own fashion, that is to say a mixture of a dandy and a tramp—with clothes half-ragged, half-chic—a large felt hat pulled down over one ear, and a purple cashmere scarf hiding part of the collar of a much-worn black overcoat whose mix and match buttons I can imagine him choosing just to add to the composition of his character.  Isn’t he already a character?  No, I think he just has an aristocratic disdain for the distasteful tasks of everyday life that bore him stiff.”

Déon’s friendship with McGahern was both thinner and murkier.  Centered around a lunch at the famous Moran’s Oyster Cottage in Kilcolgan, the chapter on their acquaintance focuses mostly on McGahern’s writing, most specifically on his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun.  Déon’s estimation of that work illuminates his own perspective on his adopted world: “Nothing so profoundly human and so unvarnishedly honest has ever been written about rural Irish society.  It rises above the blackness with which Irish literature usually speaks about its world, about its love-hate relationship with the Catholic Church and about the suffering it cultivates irremediably with such masochism.”  But McGahern the person remained a cipher to him, even after Déon visited him on his farm in County Leitrim: “I scarcely found out anything else about that deeply reserved man.  It was true that the shelves in his house in Foxfield were weighed down with books, but the names and the titles were difficult to make out.  The room where he worked was a monk’s cell of two by four metres.  The desk was a simple table made of light-wood, facing the wall.  McGahern doesn’t allow the landscape to disturb him.” (That single visit took place in January of 2005; McGahern died a little more than a year later.)

Coolly candid in his vignettes of O’Connor and McGahern, Déon casts a cold eye indeed not only on Yeats the poet but even more so on his commodified presence in the countryside in the general vicinity of Tynagh.  Dismayed by “the frenetic advance of cultural tourism” centered on Yeats, Déon courts consternation at every step he takes on a self-guided tour of the indelibly inscribed territory of Thoor Ballylee and Lady Gregory’s Coole Park.  First he visits Ballylee: “the entrance to the tower is now via a thatched cottage where all the inevitable horrors are arrayed—things like green scarves, green caps, green shields adorned with shamrocks.” He is even more appalled by the preserved schoolhouse originally underwritten by Lady Gregory at Kiltartan Cross: “The school, which has been converted into a museum, is a masterpiece of bad taste, even by Irish standards where the competition is fierce.  It could be taken for a train station in a coal-mining outpost. The charming lady who sells tickets at the desk—no tacky souvenirs there—will look like Lady Gregory in a couple of years.  With the exception of three important letters, the exhibition is of no interest: newspaper cuttings, photos, posters, a few books and, in the back room, a recreated classroom.  It’s got everything: inkwells, exercise books, pens, a blackboard, desks, and, at the front of the room, in a long skirt, a mannequin of a pretty school teacher that looks as if it might fly off like Mary Poppins.”

But Déon reserves his most righteous irreverence for Sligo Town and environs—Rosses Point, Benbulben, Drumcliff, all with obvious Yeatsian associations—which he describes visiting for the first time in decades.  And it is in this section of his chapter on Yeats that the reader might recognize that the overarching theme of Horseman, pass by!involves the myriad changes rural Ireland experienced in the economic boom of the late twentieth century.  Complaining about small-town traffic congestion, the shuttering of second-hand bookshops, the EU-mandated construction of roadways that have eliminated cattle- and sheep-clogged trunk roads as well as “the hedgerows of hawthorn, brambles and fuchsia,” the proliferation of “new buildings that spring up chaotically like poisonous mushrooms,” Déon asks: “Oh my dears, what are you doing to one of the most poetic countries in Europe?”  Musing on all of this as a self-sure octogenarian, Déon is unabashedly nostalgic for “the aristocratic Sligo” of the 1960s.  Fortunately, the severity of his judgment is generally mitigated by the richness of his writing—the distinctive wit, the smartly observed detail, the pleasing turn of phrase.

Ironically enough, Déon’s assessment of Ireland at the turn of the new century and of the new millennium—his nostalgia-infused disquiet about the country’s future—actually resonates with the perspective of Yeats’s Byzantine gilded bird perched on its bough and singing “Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”  Clearly, first with the flourishing and then with the waning of the so-called Celtic Tiger, many of Déon’s fears about what might get lost in transition have been, for better or for worse, irreversibly realized over the dozen years since the original publication of Cavalier, passé ton chemin!  But his most telling gauge of change and loss registers not in his mordant measuring of Sligo but in his series of wistful sketches of mostly anonymous individuals grounded in the physical and social landscape of south Galway.  These include members of the Galway Blazers, a fox-hunting crowd who invited his wife, a serious horsewoman, to join their circle.  One of this crowd, the superannuated Lady H who rides side-saddle while sporting a tricorne hat, ultimately becomes, in her physical and mental decline, an emblem for Déon of her social class in its decline. Ditto for Derek T, “the last gentleman of leisure in our part of the west of Ireland.”  The third husband of the mistress of Woodlawn, a decaying estate near Kilcolgan, Derek represents “the end of his race”: “He was the perfect symbol of the middle English aristocracy, who had arrived in Ireland centuries earlier as conquerors following in Cromwell’s footsteps. Ireland had slowly destroyed them, taking their virtues and distilling in them the slow poison of its laziness in a curious seesaw movement.”  Willfully obliviousness to the social and economic changes of latter-day Ireland and their effect on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, Derek finally engineers his own abrupt end.

Most of the characters drawn by Déon are truly the likes of whom will not be seen again (that old refrain).  One of these is the bicycle-riding postman from Ballindereen, in the vicinity where the author and his family lived when they first moved to Ireland.  Remembering him in “his big postman’s cap and trussed up in his black Sunday suit, with his trouser legs stuffed into his bicycle clips to reveal huge clodhopper shoes,” Déon writes: “Tim was like Prometheus when, standing upright on the pedals, he climbed the slight incline that led to us.” Reflecting on him decades later, he wonders: “Would he have liked the changes in his country?  . . . Would he shed a tear in memory of the poky little shop-cum-post office, the road that flooded under the slightest downpour, the freezing church, and the petrol pump that the shopkeeper manoeuvred with a fierce energy one could only dream of?”

Other cameos include a handyman named Pat-Jo Smith whom Déon admired for his embodiment of “the very Irish privilege of being at ease everywhere, being uncomfortable in no situation, an exemplary absence of barriers between people, a social fabric with no class divisions.”  And there is Sarah, who took to the roads after burying the last of her six children. She is a timeless figure: “For centuries, she had been walking the roads of Donegal, Mayo and Connemara, miming an imaginary conversation with the dead with expressive gestures, swinging the bundle she was carrying filled with a few rags, cans of beer, and potatoes cooked in ashes, her only food.”  Another figure in the landscape is an elderly local named Ciaron Barnett.  Displaced from his farm by his son after suffering a heart attack, he slipped away from his ever-vigilant wife and hitched a ride with Déon to Galway City; he returned home three days later, “grinning from ear to ear, delighted with his adventure”: “He’d bought a calf and a horse along the way, leaving what could be deemed a down payment of honour, fifty pence, for each of them.  The rest of the sum was to be completed when his eldest son went to collect them with his cattle truck.”

Unified by Michel Déon’s sharp eye and winning voice, Horseman, pass by!is truly engaging from start to finish.  It is also candidly illuminating of the author’s specific time and place: rural Ireland during a period of many rapid changes.  Subtitled Irish pages, it might remind some readers of Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal published in German in 1957, just shy of a half-century before Cavalier, passé ton chemin!  Those same readers might recall Böll’s gently ironic disclaimer: “This Ireland exists: but whoever goes there and fails to find it has no claim on the author.”