Irish Journal Read online

  HEINRICH BÖLL

  In 1972, Heinrich Böll became the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. Born in Cologne, in 1917, Böll was reared in a liberal Catholic, pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prison camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963), Group Portrait with Lady (1971), and The Safety Net (1979). In 1981 he published a memoir, What’s to Become of the Boy? or: Something to Do with Books. Böll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in June 1985.

  Hugo Hamilton is a novelist and the author of the bestselling German-Irish memoir, The Speckled People, about Hamilton’s childhood in Dublin with a German mother and a fervent Irish nationalist father who prohibited the use of English in the house. He is also the author of Die Redselige Insel, a travel book in the steps of the Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal, which was published in German by Luchterhand fifty years after the original. He lives in Dublin.

  The Essential

  HEINRICH BÖLL

  The Clown

  The Safety Net

  Billiards at Half-Past Nine

  The Train Was on Time

  Irish Journal

  Group Portrait with Lady

  What’s to Become of the Boy? Or:

  Something to Do with Books—A Memoir

  The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

  Translator’s Acknowledgment

  I am deeply grateful to my husband, William Vennewitz,

  for his assistance in this translation.

  Leila Vennewitz

  Vancouver, Canada

  Irish Journal

  Originally published in German as Irisches Tagebuch by Heinrich Böll

  © 1957, 1988, 2005 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG,

  Cologne, Germany

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz

  Introduction © 2011 Hugo Hamilton

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:

  Böll, Heinrich, 1917-1985.

  [Irisches Tagebuch. English]

  Irish journal / Heinrich Böll; translated from the German by Leila

  Vennewitz.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in German as Irisches Tagebuch by Heinrich Boll,

  c1957, 1988, 2005 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG,

  Cologne, Germany.”

  eISBN: 978-1-935554-83-7

  1. Ireland–Description and travel. 2. Böll, Heinrich, 1917-1985–Travel–

  Ireland. I. Title.

  DA978.B5613 2011

  914.1504′823–dc22

  2011000600

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  _______________

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  by Hugo Hamilton

  Epigraph

  IRISH JOURNAL

  1. Arrival I

  2. Arrival II

  3. Pray for the Soul of Michael O’Neill

  4. Mayo—God Help Us

  5. Skeleton of a Human Habitation

  6. Itinerant Political Dentist

  7. Portrait of an Irish Town Limerick in the Morning

  Limerick in the Evening

  8. When God Made Time …

  9. Thoughts on Irish Rain

  10. The Most Beautiful Feet in the World

  11. The Dead Redskin of Duke Street

  12. Gazing into the Fire

  13. When Seamus Wants a Drink …

  14. Mrs. D.’s Ninth Child

  15. A Small Contribution to Occidental Mythology

  16. Not a Swan to Be Seen

  17. In a Manner of Speaking

  18. Farewell

  Epilogue

  INTRODUCTION

  by Hugo Hamilton

  When Heinrich Böll first arrived in Ireland in the 1950s, the country was still asleep. He describes the journey by night across the Irish sea on the mail boat—the Catholic priest with the safety pins, the returning emigrant, the infinite cups of tea and the huddle of whispered conversations. He sets foot at dawn in a place where time is not a measurable substance. Where clocks and language itself are not instruments of exact truth, but of social guesswork. It is a place “far from the center,” where poverty and wealth are still in the hands of God, where the people have not yet woken up from that deep spell of religious faith.

  It is into this timeless landscape that the German writer arrives, as Joyce would put it, trying to wake up from the nightmare of history in Europe. Ireland has been untouched by the Second World War. It has also remained untouched by the post-war rush for material certainty. It is a place where the children are “natural,” where the people survive on their humor and reduce their misfortune by saying that things “could be worse.”

  Ireland is a sanctuary. An exceptional place which has stalled at an exceptional moment in time, just before it “leaped over a century and a half and caught up with another five” into modernism. He finds refuge here on the outer rim of Europe and sends home a beautiful literary postcard to his people.

  I can still remember this small travel book first arriving by post in our house in Dublin. It was in German, sent by my aunt in Salzburg. For my German mother, it was a verification of her own move across to Ireland. Like Heinrich Böll, she came from the Rhineland, and reading his collection of short, evocative sketches was more like leafing back through her own first impressions. He was speaking out of her mouth, as they say in Germany.

  When I got the book to read as a boy, it turned me into a visitor in my own country. I had grown up in Ireland, but there was a familiar tone in the writer’s observations which confirmed to me that I was also a newcomer, from somewhere else. My view of the country and its people was out of register by a few degrees to the east along the map of Europe where it got dark an hour or two earlier than it did in Ireland.

  In effect, I had already inherited this book. I had grown up with the writer’s sense of surprise and incomprehension. I understood his innocence, his limited knowledge, his wide-angle enthusiasm, deep with affection at first sight. Perhaps I had also inherited the visitor’s simplistic awareness of what is strange.

  Heinrich Böll is the classic traveler, comparing and counting the differences. He wanders around the city of Dublin and hears the people repeatedly saying “sorry,” like an habitual Irish greeting. The banks are not open yet and he cannot change money, but he still manages to get to Westport by train, on trust. The railway staff even phone ahead to let everyone know of the passenger traveling on credit.

  He makes his way out to Achill Island and finds a savage beauty in the landscape—silence, weather, anger in the sea, people now and again, and distances which are painful on the eyes.

  “… beauty hurts because on sunny days you can see for twenty, thirty miles without human habitation: only azure islands that are not real …”

  There is a disclaimer at the beginning of Irish Journal which I sometimes feel like hanging around my own neck. “This Ireland exists: but whoever goes there and fails to find it has no claim on the
author.”

  The invocation to the reader is not to take everything literally. He makes no claim for authenticity. He is telling us only what he sees with his own eyes. Like a modernist painter, Jack B. Yeats, or Matisse, he trusts us to believe the extravagant flight of colors without expecting to find them again in real life. He is aware how quickly the light can change its mind in Ireland.

  Of course the people are still saying “sorry” all the time. Of course they still live on their humor and their imagination. But he doesn’t want us to go knocking on the door of the doctor’s house in Achill Island to see if the doctor’s wife really has a lacquered fingernail that looks like a shiny car tracing her husband’s winding journey along the map. Or to ask whether the patient the doctor has gone to call on really has the most beautiful feet in the world. Or where the copper kettle is which he brought back with him as payment on that stormy night.

  How can you go back and recover that lyrical moment where a man in his fifties is seen leaving the house and walking away up the hill, becoming younger and younger with each step as he goes, finally looking back as the boy he once was, before disappearing beyond a fuchsia hedge?

  Nor does he want us to go looking for the post-office girl at Keel to see if she really does have the eyes of Vivien Leigh. As it happens, I’ve met the post-office girl myself and I can confirm that she has those remarkable, blue-green, celluloid eyes that make you think you’re in a movie. What’s more, so do all her children. But then I haven’t met Vivien Leigh.

  The Ireland in this Irish Journal does exist. It is there in our past, in our memory. I can claim to be the firsthand witness. I ran around the streets of that Ireland of the 1950s wearing German leather trousers and an Irish Aran Sweater, half Irish and half German. So I can account for this book like my own memory. But as always, our memory comes after us, full of blank spaces and longing and missing things that you could not see at the time. It remains real and vivid, full of intuition, close and personal and brightly unverifiable.

  What interests Heinrich Böll is the randomness of Irish life, the luck, the contradictions and the waiting. The whole country seems to be waiting for something. In a cinema facing out towards the Atlantic, the people in the audience are gathered, smoking and talking, passing around sweets and passing around jokes, waiting for the priest to arrive so that the movie can finally begin.

  He records the grip of the Catholic Church on Irish society. He includes the gambling and the drinking. But he has not come here as a sociologist or a social worker. He has enough reforming to get on with in his own country, so his role is more that of a passive observer whose own sense of regret is somehow in tune with the people here. He catches the heartbreak of Irish emigration with great accuracy by describing the bus driver waiting politely for the last tears and the last good byes to be said before he can finally put the engine in gear and carry the passengers away into the unknown distance.

  He talks about the September children of Achill. Conceived around Christmas when the emigrants return home from England and born in the late summer when the fathers are away. He awaits the birth of one of these September children and allows himself to speak for the mother.

  “From here, Nuala McNamara went to New York to sell nylons in Woolworth’s, John became a teacher in Dublin, Tommy a Jesuit in Rome, Brigid married and went to London—but Mary clung doggedly to this hopeless, lonely spot, where every September for four years she has borne a child.”

  Why does Böll call this a lonely spot? What entitlement does he have to see this place as hopeless? Is the visitor not protected from such grief by the ability to go home again? Written into these impressions is the longing which the traveler unlocks within himself. It has touched something in his own heart. There is a denied loneliness in the German people, an unspoken exile which strikes an open-hearted echo here.

  The people of Achill have spoken of Böll as a friendly man who was good at telling a story and who smoked as much as anyone else on the island. But underneath the black beret which he famously wore and which made him look like a revolutionary and also at times like a priest, they also found a sadness in his expression. He had sad eyes, I am told.

  So perhaps, like the subsequent stream of German visitors inspired by his journal to authenticate this country, Böll has come to Ireland in search of what is missing in himself. That fractured idea of home which the Irish know how to repair. An emotional innocence, you might call it, which has already been removed from Europe. An uncomplicated connection to the landscape and the people which is not so easy in Germany after the horrors of Nazism.

  For the writer whose country was still struggling with the moral ruins of the Third Reich and the new landscape of the post-war economic miracle, the journey to Ireland becomes a kind of self-exploration. His observations are expressions of loss as much as discovery. He seeks shelter from the homelessness and the wreckage of the German language after the war. His journal has been called “a hidden book about Germany” and it is easy to see how the process of regenerating the German soul is assisted by the existence of a place on the western edge of Europe which can still provide illusions, colors, and poetry—shifting things that are not fully prosecuted by explanation.

  Standing among the ruins of the deserted village at Dugort, he cannot escape the glance back at the bombed out ruins of his own home town of Cologne. In a pub conversation, he becomes the unwitting recipient of a peculiar form of Irish hospitality in which he is told that Hitler was not so bad after all. Böll cannot let it go. He must extract this rotten tooth once and for all, even though the lesson here is more for himself and for his own people.

  There is also something Utopian in Böll’s view of Ireland. Something childlike smiling back at us from the past which makes us so grown up now, so complicated with knowledge. His comments on contraception are in tune with the time but they also betray the women giving birth to September babies. His silence on social issues seems out of character. But our rear-view assessment is entangled in layers of judgement and revelation. We can see a darkness back there that makes us feel superior, more liberated and better off, yet all the more uncertain.

  While the book became a German traveler’s missal, the Irish people never cared very much for it. Perhaps we were offended by the view from outside. We didn’t want to be seen as the people who never moved on. Now that we have moved on and become the visitors dropping in on our own past, this book may still prove to have been written as a hidden book for the Irish. Because it shows us precisely what lies behind, what we have become and what we have lost, what we are glad to get rid of and what we want to keep.

  Is it possible also that the traveler becomes corrupted by the places he visits? Was Böll seduced by Ireland and sent back to Germany with a vision that was out of reach? Out of reach for us all. What can you do with souvenirs and shells and bog colors and dusty bits of moonlight on the water? Maybe it is the lightness of the Irish conversation and those effortless skills of self-dramatization which have changed him.

  That encounter with Ireland on the eve of globalization must have fired up his literary imagination. Perhaps the Irish gave him false courage. Perhaps we played a part in turning the later Nobel Laureate into a crusader and politically engaged cult figure, a moralist, fighting on a battlefield of ideas where he triumphed and also paid such a heavy price.

  Many of things he warned the Germans about would eventually come to sweep Ireland too in spite of his premonitions. He was too polite to warn us. He must have thought the Irish deserved a break after all that history had done to us and all the rain coming in off the Atlantic drumming down on the houses of Achill before it moved on to Europe. He didn’t love us just because we were poor and funny and unpunctual. He loved the Irish because he saw something in us that the Germans once had too.

  What Heinrich Böll has put down in this small travel book remains timeless. It may be nothing more than a stacked up lobster train of precious artifacts and emotional responses to the landscape a
nd stories of unforgettable people he met while he was in Ireland gathering inspiration.

  But this Ireland exists. The post office girl is still living on Achill. The doctor’s practice continues to be operated by the doctor’s son. Every year on the first weekend in May, the people of Achill hold a literary festival in honor of Heinrich Böll, curated by one of the September children of Dooagh. The dogs of Dukinella are still barking and the rain still rains and the cliffs still hurt your eyes. The Bervie guesthouse where the young German writer first stayed and wrote down many of these impressions is still there, a single story white building close to the beach at Keel which is run by the sister of the post office girl. It was here that Böll lay awake and heard the surf lapping right up to his feet, where he woke up in the morning and must have thanked the lord it was not the sound of an Autobahn, where he set off on his long field trips with his big Catholic family.

  At times the storm comes up with such force that the fine sand is lifted over the house and has to be swept off the path and out of the gullies and drains and brought back to the beach again. Left to its own devices the sand would just cover over everything.

  Dublin, 2011

  This Ireland exists: but whoever goes there and

  fails to find it has no claim on the author.

  I dedicate this little book to the man who

  encouraged me to write it: Karl Korn.

  H.B.

  The Ireland described in this book is that of the mid-1950s.

  My comments on the great changes that have taken place

  in that country since then are contained in the Epilogue.

  Heinrich Böll

  1

  ARRIVAL I

  As soon as I boarded the steamer I could see, hear, and smell that I had crossed a frontier. I had seen one of England’s gentle, lovely sides: Kent, almost bucolic—I had barely skimmed the topographical marvel that is London—then seen one of England’s gloomier sides, Liverpool—but here on the steamer there was no more England: here there was already a smell of peat, the sound of throaty Celtic from between decks and the bar, here Europe’s social order was already assuming new forms: poverty was no longer “no disgrace,” it was neither honor nor disgrace: it was—as an element of social awareness—as irrelevant as wealth; trouser creases had lost their sharp edge, and the safety pin, that ancient Celtic clasp, had come into its own again. Where the button had looked like a full stop, put there by the tailor, the safety pin had been hung on like a comma; a sign of improvisation, it draped the material in folds, where the button had prevented this. I also saw it used to attach price tickets, lengthen suspenders, replace cuff-links, finally used as a weapon by a small boy to pierce a man’s trouser seat: the boy was surprised, frightened because the man did not react in any way; the boy carefully tapped the man with his forefinger to see if he was still alive: he was still alive, and patted the boy laughingly on the shoulder.