Wicked Little Joe Read online

  This is worthy of Kafka or Beckett. Who were the two mysterious ‘escorts’ on these outward and return journeys? – one who charged for his services, the other who didn’t, and who ‘had the benefit of the car’? Sam Beckett was an old friend of my grandfather’s. I wonder if Sam got ideas for some of his more puzzling plays from Old Joe? – perhaps during the long walks they used to make together in the 1930s, up and down the Tipperary mountains. I can add that the one pound return rail fare charged to the Butlers, Bennettsbridge-Kilkenny, seems excessive for 1942, since the two stations were only five miles apart. These financial arrangements, with their consequent puzzlements and misunderstandings between my grandfather and the Butlers, are endless. They clearly absorbed a great deal of their time, which might have been better spent in writing their books and essays. Another letter, from November 1944:

  Dear Peggy

  I don’t quite understand about the expense for Little Joe. I mean the ‘12½% boarding’. And the fee I take it is £5.5.0 for the three months. What will be the total cost? Could you let me know approximately? I mean within £2 or so, for his three month stay in Dublin. You know we think he is much better with you than in any other imaginable place. If I was endowed with £1,000 [he has crossed out £2,000] for his upbringing I could not think it better spent than you wd. spend it on him, and whatever happens we will always feel grateful to you for all you have done for him.

  Only as I have explained, I am not so endowed … and have to consider, as far as can be possible, preserving enough money, so that my old age and Vera’s will not be one of penury … so you must not think me mean if I do ‘talk of money’ in connection with Little Joe.

  Well, both parties went on with their ‘talk of money’. It seems their lives, and certainly mine, clearly depended on this. And it was sometimes angry talk. From another cloudy letter to Hubert Butler, early in 1945:

  Dear Hubert,

  I was in bed when Vera got the telephone. She came up and said it was Peggy. ‘Peggy says they are taking a holiday to friends, and Joe is invited. But before going Hubert said we’d better phone and consult the Hones about the cost of Joe’s travelling.’ I said ‘Do you know what the cost will be?’ And Vera returned to the phone and came back with the answer that she didn’t know, but ‘supposed about the same as the fare to Kilkenny’. I said ‘All right but perhaps you’d better ask if there will be any motor sharings as well.’ Peggy replied that ‘There wd. be four motors for Joe to share in and also his part in any incidental expenses.’ I said then ‘We may as well have him here’, as I thought at the time we’d have a servant in, and besides Vera wd. like to see him.

  At this you Butlers got very angry – why I can’t imagine, since you had at first invited me to make the decision. It was you I gathered who suggested I might like to make the little economy, and now you write as if I was trying to make the economy at your expense.

  There are other things to discuss in regard to your letter, other grievances; but this I wd. like to clear up first, for if we can’t clear up so simple a question, how can we clear up anything?

  Quite so. My grandfather, in the light of his earlier letter querying the excessive return rail fare to Kilkenny, was understandably chary about lashing out another pound for a brief trip on Irish railways, especially since it might well include the mysterious ‘escort’ again, who this time, thinking he was onto a very good thing, might have charged the Butlers, and thereafter Old Joe, two pounds. And then there is the curious business of my ‘sharing in the expenses of four motors’. One can hardly blame my grandfather for querying this. Four motors? Quite a cavalcade, in petrol-starved wartime Ireland – and surely, aged eight, I would only take up small room in one of the motors? And then the consequent ‘incidental expenses’. My word! On such an apparently extravagant holiday these might be substantial, a Monte Carlo sum. I can imagine my grandfather in his nightcap, turning on his sick bed, groaning, seeing red for the next six months on his overdrawn bank account. Grievances indeed! And grievances taken onto a philosophical, even a religious plane in a further letter, to Peggy Butler, in May 1945:

  My dear Peggy

  The first thing to remember in this discussion is the obvious thing, that neither you nor I created this world. Little Joe was born under unfortunate auspices with no silver spoon in his mouth. This is not necessarily fatal to him. Many people so born have done well. But it is a fact to be remembered in discussion with me, as when you say my object is merely to save money. No, it is a question of what I can properly spend on him, having regard to my other obligations. So no doubt with you.

  He is in fact in childhood at ‘the caprice of the stock market’ … I can make no promises about him; nor can you. It can never be a question of more than six months or so ahead. Hubert’s notion of calling in his parents is quite illusory, unless he believes in miracles, which he doesn’t. He can write if he likes to them, but it will only waste the postage stamp.

  ‘At the caprice of the stock market’ indeed. Was my grandfather’s meanness nature or nurture? Or was it not meanness at all, but simply understandable self-preservation? Certainly it was hardly nurture. His father, William Hone, retired early from the law, was well off. A family photograph, taken in what must have been the early 1920s in the garden of Palermo, his large Killiney house, when he would have been in his late seventies, shows him to be a short, stout, genial Victorian paterfamilias, moustached and watch-chained. He is surrounded by some of his extensive family, including my father Nat and my aunt Sally as children, sitting on the grass in front. William Hone’s wife Sarah is not there. One of the seven beautiful Cooper sisters from Cooper Hill in County Limerick, she died at only twenty-nine, having given birth to my grandfather Joseph, and three others – my great-aunt Olive, and my two great-uncles Patrick and Christopher. Also in the picture is Maria, the formidable-looking housekeeper. There they all are, in rather stiff, outdated Edwardian clothes – a collection of quietly confident, high-bourgeois Dubliners.

  No, it can’t have been from his family that Old Joe got his terrible nervousness about money. It may have been due to the fact that throughout his life he rarely earned more than a guinea or so, for his lengthy book reviews for The Irish Times, The London Mercury, and The Times Literary Supplement, and lived off what was initially a substantial, but after the Great Depression in the 1930s an ever-reducing capital. And I, of course, came to be a major cause of this reduction: I and my first three siblings – Geraldine, Antony and Camillus – turning up on his doorstep, me as a toddler and the others in squirming bundles. This was surely a major factor in his miserliness.

  In this anybody would have sympathy for him. He had paid expensively for the upbringing and education of his own three children – Nathaniel my father, my aunt Sally and my uncle David. To be landed with the financial and other responsibilities of looking after four more children, albeit his grandchildren, in his early old age, could well make the best of us feel put upon – and miserly. Besides, Old Joe, who was young once – though it was hard to credit this by the time I met him – was bad with children. The whole business of family and children, it seems, was quite alien to him. Beatty Glenavy (of whom more later), a great friend of my grandparents, once showed me a nicely wicked cartoon which my grandfather’s friend Max Beerbohm had done of him and his wife Vera on their honeymoon night in Paris in about 1910: they were shown in a great canopied four-poster bed, Joe nervous in a pointy nightcap, Vera small and apprehensive, bedclothes up to her neck, with the caption, ‘What do we do now, Vera?’ I never saw the cartoon again. It must have disappeared into Beatty’s estate when she died.

  Yes, Vera, my grandmother. In age, the skin tight against her high cheekbones, the flesh retreating everywhere, leaving her teeth half bared; a skeletal, mournful expression, sometimes wide-eyed in horrified astonishment; put-upon, restless. Or motionless, sitting on a stool gazing into the fire, bony knees steeply raised, legs crossed and intertwined like a contortionist’s, a cigarette in her long
fine fingers, smoke curling round her head, gazing quizzically through the mist.

  A woman who never found herself? Or never knew what she was looking for? Or who was admired so much in youth that her beauty may have seemed all-sufficient? For there is no doubt that Vera had been very beautiful. Dark-haired, large clear blue eyes, that wonderful bone structure, an innocent face; she wore anything with a sophisticated, easy grace. The face I have seen in some of William Orpen’s several fine portraits of her: ‘The Blue Hat’ – sold for a fortune a few years ago – and ‘The Roscommon Dragoon’, where she’s wearing a military uniform with unconscious panache. Orpen couldn’t stop painting her when he and my grandparents were neighbours in Edwardian Dublin; dozens of sketches and several portraits. Orpen was certainly enticed by her beauty, and possibly by the hope of her as mistress? But that wasn’t on. Vera was happily married at that point and of Puritan New England stock. Or was she? It may have been, as it was with me, uncertainty about her own family background that gave her that sometimes deeply mystified, perturbed look.

  For with Vera there was not the long family tree of the Dublin Hones but one with the main branches missing. Little of her antecedents were ever revealed to me, so I assumed there was something to hide. Her family name was Brewster. I remember as a child hearing of the film, The Brewster Millions, and thinking that Vera must be part of these millions. I couldn’t understand the penny-pinching so predominant in her household.

  That Vera had a mother and father must be beyond dispute, but neither was ever spoken of in the family. She had been brought up in New York by her aunt Julia. This was freely admitted, because aunt Julia, taking the stage name of Julia Marlowe, was the foremost classical actress of her time in late-nineteenth-century America.

  A 1940s reminiscence of aunt Julia, when she was at the height of her fame in the early 1900s, by the American playwright George Middleton describes her as having ‘Loose black hair enfolding her pale face, the rich mouth and large wise eyes that looked out provocatively at me, when I was twenty-two, as she lay propped up in bed, with a crimson coverlet pulled up to the book of verse she was reading in that priceless voice of hers.’

  She must have been a sensuous woman as well as a fine actress, a point at least partly confirmed by a studio photograph taken in 1897 when Julia, in her twenties, had just made her first great impact on the New York stage. It shows a biggish girl, staring straight to camera with shadowed, slumberous bedroom eyes, dark coiled tresses falling down over a wide décolleté, one bare arm, saucily at her hip, draped with a shawl. Yes, quite the temptress, except for the voluminous dress she’s wearing – a heavy damask outfit, roped at the waist, a rope which then coils round her hips, falling away into a tassel of woolly bobbles. A bedspread, it seems. Not a great come-on, considering she was playing Juliet in the photograph.

  This was a role she made so famous in America in her youth that, having married her older actor-manager Henry Southern, she played the lovelorn girl, with Henry as Romeo, until the two of them were at either end of their sixties. They toured America in their later years in these roles, in their own Pullman car, usually just playing the balcony scene – conclusive proof of the star-crossed lovers’ deathless love, since both actors were now presumably quite long in the tooth and wrinkly round the gills. This didn’t deter the audiences one bit. Southern and Marlowe brought the house down, from Albany to Albuquerque.

  All this mummery made aunt Julia a very rich woman – the more so on the death of Henry, upon which she retired and spent the rest of her life in grand hotels, with a bevy of Pekinese dogs, in Switzerland, and every winter at the Cateract Hotel at Assuan in Upper Egypt. However, playing against type in their famous roles as lovers, they failed to have children. And so it was that aunt Julia took charge of Vera and her younger sister Grace, bringing them up and becoming their foster mother.

  But who were their real parents? – there’s the rub. The file and other family letters give no indication. Years ago I had some information on this, from Beatty Glenavy in Dublin. Beatty, née Beatrice Elvery, a fine painter who married Gordon, Lord Glenavy (and was mother to Paddy Campbell, the witty columnist and stammering TV panel-game star, and his younger brother Michael Campbell, the fine novelist). Beatty was a great friend of my grandfather’s before and after he married. She told me how Joe and Vera had met in Paris in 1910. Aunt Julia had brought Vera over to Paris on a Grand Tour of sorts, staying at a grand hotel and buying her expensive hats and clothes in shops on the rue St Honoré. Here they met Old Joe (or Young Joe, as he must have been then) himself in Paris at the time with his friends Willie Yeats and John Synge.

  Vera and Joe were smitten. They must have made an attractive and unusual pair, this American beauty and the tall, gauntly distinguished-looking Irishman. Marriage was proposed. This was not taken well by Joe’s father in Dublin, who, Beatty told me, got the unlikely idea that Vera and her aunt were American fortune hunters out looking for a rich catch in Europe. Au contraire, Julia Marlowe was much richer than any of the Hones.

  In the event, Joe and Vera had to get married secretly, in 1911, Beatty explained – with a week’s notice, in a suburban church, by special licence from the Archbishop of Dublin, at eight in the morning, with Beatty and the church verger as the only witnesses – Beatty supplying the ring, a curtain ring, which she’d bought the previous day in a local haberdasher’s.

  Apart from retailing this drama, it was Beatty’s view that Vera was possibly aunt Julia’s illegitimate daughter, not her niece – aunt Julia’s husband Henry Southern, Beatty implied, not being much of a Romeo in that department. But then who was the real father? Beatty didn’t know.

  Years later I had some further information from my uncle David in Dublin. It seems Vera’s mother was aunt Julia’s flighty younger sister who, having married conventionally (to a man of German extraction, called Burster, not Brewster) had given birth to Vera and her sister Grace, but had then abandoned husband and children and run off with a cad to Florida, never to surface again, either in reality or in the family annals. Everything was hushed up and aunt Julia then took charge of the two ‘Orphans of the Storm’ – a family embarrassment that repeated itself with me and my six brothers and sisters fifty years later. Which still leaves the question – what happened to the conventional husband, Mr Burster, father of my grandmother? He, too, has been erased from Vera’s family record. In any event this difficult, cloudy background, rather like my own, may have had a lot to do with Vera’s later sessions by the fire, on a stool, legs entwined; her puzzled, nervous look, gazing into the flames.

  My grandparents were nervous people.

  My aunt Sally once told me that the Hones were nervous people generally, a fact perhaps confirmed by my grandfather who, instead of living in his own lovely house, South Hill, overlooking Killiney Bay, leased it out in 1939 and lived the rest of his twenty years in leased accommodation: four houses in Ireland, in Dublin and the countryside, with earlier winters spent in rented houses in Provence and Italy.

  These continual domestic upheavals suggest a certain nervous restlessness. Or perhaps that he wanted others to take the financial responsibility for the upkeep of the houses he lived in, and might avoid having to do the same with his own house? Certainly even as late as 1946, when he and Vera were in their seventies and apparently settled in Ballyorney House, a lovely if quite unsuitably isolated rented place beyond Enniskerry in the Wicklow mountains, he was still considering moving abroad.

  In a letter to Hubert Butler, in the early 1950s, he writes:

  Vera and I may have to spend our declining years abroad, what with the cold (May, what a May) and the prices of houses in Ireland. I asked the landlord of Ballyorney for what price he would sell the house, and he suggested £7,000! The rent is £130 p/a and for £7,000 one can still get £240 a year in gilt edged securities, nearly twice as much; formerly it was the other way round.

  I think Old Joe was nervous and miserly simply because he was totally unfitted for ordina
ry life, which he felt was going to ambush and bankrupt him at any moment, as indeed it nearly did with the arrival of all those babies on his doorstep. Apart from money, his mind moved on higher things: Swift’s deeply pessimistic reflections, Berkeley’s philosophic riddles, Nietzsche’s deterministic superman, Yeats’s ever-twirling gyres. Old Joe was a philosopher. He spent a good deal of his later years compiling a philosophical dictionary in a big red ledger with his equally philosophic friend, the writer Arland Ussher. At Joe’s death they had reached the letter ‘B’. Dealing properly with Aristotle, Aquinas and St Augustine had obviously taken up a good deal of their time.

  Clearly, dealing with the world as it unfortunately is taxed Old Joe. In looking at an egg he was seeing something else – a rough beast inside, about to be born, before slouching towards Bethlehem. Or the egg was a potato. This he certainly thought, for on one of my grandmother’s rare evenings out of the house, when they came to live in Dublin, she told him to boil himself an egg for supper in the kitchen. He put a new potato in the electric kettle, without water, turned it on, went away and forgot about it. The kettle had no automatic switch-off, so that it and part of the dresser were badly burnt on my grandmother’s return.

  My grandfather was a preoccupied man.

  Apart from his various philosophic concerns, money and me, he had a fourth even more taxing problem to contend with – dealing with his son, and my father, and my mother Biddy. He writes to Hubert in June 1945:

  There is nothing to say of Nat and Biddy. You always assume they can make ‘moves’, as you might, or I might. What moves can they make? I have never heard of them making a move in their lives, except for getting married.