On February 22nd, 1900, gales and squally showers blade in across the Lee and on Half Moon Street in Cork, there are two topics of conversation. A woman from the street has been jailed at the Petty Sessions for drunkenness and the Whelans in No. 16 are after having a child. They call him John.
Half Moon Street is dominated by the stage door, dressing rooms and scene dock of the Opera House. The show playing February 22nd is a J.W. Whitbread melodrama called True Son Of Erin, and across in No 16, you can almost hear a snigger from the infant Sean O Faolain.
Years later, the child born Whelan described his side of the street: "An ancient cooperage, composed of sheds and an old cobbled yard, smelling of old iron, beer barrels and wine vats; then the stables, smelling of hay and horse dung; then came a forge, smelling of coal smoke and annealing iron, clanging all day long . . . "
The Whelans move down Half Moon Street into the roomier No 5. John and his brothers share an attic room, "the three of us strewn in one featherbed like three white robed puppets". They peek out the window at the hubbub behind the Opera House: "Men and women passing to and from the stage, hurriedly or slowly, a robed king with a crown, a pirate with a cutlass, beautiful girls in pink tights and tiny skirts, their arms, backs and bosoms paper white, a Negro in chains, a tattered beggar."
John's mother, Bridget, takes in "arteestes" as lodgers. The house teems with sopranos in pink kimonos, gloomy comics, haunted thesps. They help John with his sums and he falls in love with the girl who gets sawn in half every night by The Great Lafayette. "She was the only woman whose empty Players carton I ever kissed with tears."
Midnight song is frequent on Half Moon Street and as patrons decamp to the Alaska Bar, they loose a few verses. John sinks into sleep listening to I Wonder If You Miss Me Sometimes, Miss Me When The Twilight's Blue or By The Light Of The Silvery Moon.
He gets older and wanders all over Cork, learns to describe its feel. "Its slums have a hot verminous smell - walk down Millard Street of a summer day and you get the pure bouquet of it." See how he captures the city's chromatic: "The two colours of my childhood, the raingod's green, dark as passion, and this pallid immensity of sky." Or how he evokes the hot rush of teenage hormones: "Along the darkening quays, in doors and alleys and the coigns of battered houses, the shawled girls and their boys make love; the shawl is wrapped tight around them both and under it, they lean in tight embrace." His childhood Cork is a place "where passion lives at blood heat".
He wanders to places now gone: Three Hatchet and Featherbed and Merrypole Lane. He sees faction fights between Molly Malones and All For Irelands. He hears old-timers talk of Cork characters from the deep of the 1800s, men like Bob Helen and Ebenezer Bogan. He sees the Coal Quay girls in purple stockings and golden tasselled caps,"reflecting a half barbaric love of colour". There are visits to Dan Lowry's Palace, "the smell of the long white washed walk to the gallery, oranges and urine and body sweat."
He's awed by Poole's Miorama, two revolving cylinders of painted scenery, and in 1913, sees his first film, Quo Vadis. At the Opera House, Lennox Robinson's Patriots changes his life. John is becoming Sean.
Presentation College he claims to resent, says it processes "conformists by the ton". But friends say he's quintessentially "Prez", cocky and stylish, a born manager. He is already working on that urbane image: the hat, the poised cigarette. In later life he'll mix a mean Martini and publish stories in Playboy.
As a young man, he came to resent "the damp dark miasmic valley". The narrow streets have a closed-in feel, the same feel Paul Durcan later captured as being "as intimate and homicidal as a little Marseilles". After independence, O Faolain is dismayed by the new country, says it is "unimaginative, commonplace and circumscribed . . . a dreary Eden". In adulthood, he is charmed instead by Italy, by "its adulation of the joyful Now!" and he sometimes dreams of Cork in Italian weather and wakes in tears.
In middle age, though, he mellows: "When I meet men who have led an easier life in an easier atmosphere, they seem to me to have led no life at all - none fit for a writer at any rate." He begins to quote the old lines about his city, how Athens is the Cork of Greece and how Venice could be as lovely if only they'd fill in the canals. "I would not have been born elsewhere. There is steel in Cork. There is flint and the spark of fire. There is endless challenge. I would not, I repeat, be born out of it."
Today Half Moon Street looks over Cork's new cultural quarter and the whole city is being remade to a design that is more than a little Italianate. It has come around to his way of thinking.
He's dead nine years but for his relationship with the city, this is trivial. "There are many corners in Cork," he once wrote, "that my homesick ghost will haunt."
The Sean O Faolain Centenary Conference runs at UCC on Friday and Saturday. On Friday, Sean O Faolain's daughter, the novelist Julia O Faolain, presents a paper called "The Man Who Stayed"; on Satur- day the speakers include Prof John A. Murphy and the novelist Colm Toibin. For information contact 021-902241
