Peter Costello
Summer outings (No.6 in a six-part series)
This book, edited from Tim White’s Irish diaries, was published in 1959, the year after the compilation of his separately published Arthurian novels appeared in one volume, The Once and Future King.
This book became a major best seller here and in the Americas. It provided the source material for the musical Camelot (1960), so beloved by the Kennedys, and made White a very great deal of money in contrast to the couple of hundred pounds that the rapacious Walt Disney paid for the films rights to the first volume of the series, The Sword in the Stone (1939), money that provided some comforts in White’s last care-worn years.
The earlier Arthur books had been completed in Ireland. White recalled walking down the corridor of Healion’s Hotel in Belmullet, thinking of the day’s fishing to come and how to deal with the love story of Lancelot and Guinevere.
However, the episodes from his diary also reveal his changing attitudes to Ireland. Some of what he wrote later in his comic novels did not amuse some Irish readers. But the episodes from his diary reveal his earlier feelings for the West of Ireland just as Europe once again went to war.
He began to learn Irish, and gave serious thought to becoming a Catholic. Here he writes of climbing Croagh Patrick during the great midsummer pilgrimage in 1940…
The first 2,000 feet were easy, like any other moun-tain. We took them flippantly, relishing and marking our fellow pilgrims, into whose line we had become absorbed.
They scrambled up, five or six yards apart, in ones and twos and threes, while a thinner line of returning visitors swung freely down, accomplished, hallowed, pleased with themselves or amused at us climbers.
It dawned on me that we were back in the Canterbury Tales. No wonder Chaucer was good-humoured. For the mountain-side was in a state of fellowship – it was happy, bonhommous, mutually congratulating. Although the population of Éire was counted in millions, people kept meeting others whom they knew. And when they met, they stopped. They encountered with a great handshake. They teased and joked and laughed, far from holy or hushed. They were the very characters out of Chaucer, vulgar and surprising.
Determination
There was the Wife of Bath, closely resembling Mrs Reilly, but now black in the face with agony and determination. And there, coming down, was an acquaintance from our own village, Inspector Ryan, saluting us with welcome.
Six elderly peasants from Shrataggle, friends of ours and famous for having won some money in the Irish Sweepstake, were tramping gaily past. The eldest, the actual holder of the winning ticket, shook my hand with compliment, averring that after this we should doubtless meet in Heaven. He qualified it by adding that – at least – one of us might get there. This was a beautiful tease. He had said it as if he meant that I was the good one, he the reprobate.
Next there was the old, old lady going down. She was past 80, and could not put one foot in front of the other”
Yet he knew quite well that I was a Protestant, and thus he could leave me, in high good-humour and a slight aura of whisky, to puzzle it out.
Then there was the bookie from Belfast! There was no slightness about his aura. It rose from him in a visible mist, which would have exploded in a blue flame if he had struck a match. He was wearing a thick winter overcoat, which he had forgotten – and this was the sunniest pilgrimage in the 40-odd years since the chapel had been built.
He reeled from side to side “of the break-neck path”, singing and exhorting himself. His scarlet face was covered with carbuncles. He had been drinking whisky in the train since midnight.
When we asked him whether he thought he would get there safely, he replied: “I’m from Belfast, I am. Och aye!”
Next there was the old, old lady going down. She was past 80, and could not put one foot in front of the other. She could advance a foot, and draw the other up to it, but that was all she could do. Or was this perhaps for a vow?
She had started at one o’clock the previous night, heard Mass at dawn, and would be home at about ten. There she went softly and surely, foot up to foot, carrying her 80 years patiently down a gradient of one in four — such a morsel of light old bones that she strayed and drifted like thistledown.
There was also the photographer from Dublin, a young fellow of 30 or so, but a city man with feet as tender as your face. He had been on the pilgrimage 14 times, and loved the mountain. This time, he had decided to go barefoot. We stopped beside him for breath, and noticed that the naked foot which he was putting down on the sharp flints was trembling from the pain. It shook in an ague of agony, as he, at a snail’s pace, moved on in torment.
The last 500 feet were the worst. The tireless Jack, always as fit as a flea, led up like a will o’ the wisp, while I dragged my clumsier body over the torrent of flint which had to be taken on hands and knees. Jack said: “Don’t look up. If you look, you will lose heart.”
The pilgrims, slithering down, seemed likely to sweep us back to the foot.
I began to pray.
At last there was the blessed top…with the tiny, weather-worn chapel”
People in extremis, even agnostics we are told, generally do pray – but I was not so far gone as that. I had not come on the pilgrimage for exalted motives.
I enjoyed mountains, I wanted to see what the festival was like, and, in a moment of aberration, I had once mentioned to Mrs O’Callaghan that one day I would take her. The beatific expression on her face, when she heard this promise, had seemed impossible to disappoint.
But I was praying all the same. It was partly like the curses uttered by men in desperate struggles, and partly, I am ashamed to say, it was to impress Jack. I moved my lips so that he could see. On the other hand, less ignoble, how could one not pray when everybody else was doing so? Surely it is better to be with people than against them, and would it not have been churlish to resist the hospitality of faith which surrounded us?
****
At last there was the blessed top – all 2,500 feet of it – with the tiny, weather-worn chapel on its small table-land, and the whole world at prayer also in the sunlight above Clew Bay.
We parted and began to make our circuits of the chapel separately. We were supposed to go round seven times, saying the rosary. Five hundred people were doing the same thing, in a whirligig of worship, people of every age, in every kind of suit, lost in their own errands of petition or atonement.
If China had peace, the strife would move to South America or somewhere else”
It must have been the altitude which made me pray, or the glorious weather, or the superabundant feeling of health and happiness which comes after exertion, or the vastness of the view, or the common unconsciousness in which my miniature ego was now submerged. At all events I sauntered along with a Rosary, presenting my soul and all others to the God in whom I did not believe at sea level.
The point was that it was not possible in that bright air to pray for yourself or for other individuals: not even for Mrs O’Callaghan, who was always praying for me. It was hardly possible to pray for the human race even – for its peace or forgiveness or anything like that – because it seemed wrong to pray for anything.
You could hold it out to its maker – like a man who has been run over, mutely displaying his maimed stumps.
****
As we moved round and round so strangely, with the 365 islands of the bay like toys at our feet, and Clare Island a peep-show and the White Cow Island beyond —with Corslieve 50 miles to the north, and Achill hinting a shoulder, and the universal sea about, it was only possible to hold out the tragic filth of the human race for God to see — not feeling contempt for them, nor expecting anything to be done for them – without petition or sarcasm or confusion of mind.
I thought how the world had never been at peace. Even when Europe was not at war, China would be fighting. If China had peace, the strife would move to South America or somewhere else. Such was the human species that the whole globe had probably never been bloodless since men invented agriculture. And here we were, members of it along with the other members, revolving the top of a holy hill and not knowing what to ask. It was possible to think of the unfathomable wickedness of man, his carnivorous ferocity. It was possible to think of the other beasts, rooks and ants and mackerel and bees and wolves, 500,000 species perhaps, among whom there were only about eight kinds who indulged in warfare like man.
It was not possible to feel superior or bitter to one’s fellows about it, for we were all in the same boat.
But, in the high sunshine, it did seem within the bounds of possibility that we who were there walking, now innocently occupied for the few moments of this pilgrimage, might humbly and not despairingly regard our-selves as presentable. Presentable. There was nothing we could ask. But now, for this moment in the year, those of us who had got there could presume to draw attention to our condition.
At any other time, it would be wiser to hide. But there, today, together, perhaps men could say: “Look. Look at the pickle we are in, please God.”
So I tramped round, telling the beads and presenting my species to the infinity which surrounded us, and which also governed the half-moon, just visible in daylight, hanging part way up the dazzling blue over remote Nephin.
Edited from passages in The Godstone and the Blackymore (1959) by Terence Hanbury White. © 1959 the Estate of T. H. White.