I WAS IN the Abbey Theatre last week for a felicitation to celebrate the work of Tom McIntyre, the distinguished poet and playwright, on the occasion of his 80th birthday. I first chanced upon him in a bed in the parish of Doobally in west Cavan in 1974. He had the flu and I was a stranger who knocked on his door and fed him rum and fish until he recovered.
I, on the other hand, never recovered. Until then I had been a teacher, drinking in local pubs, sitting on the bar stool staring at my own image in the mirror, until the drink kicked in and the mountain men in damp clothes who smelled of sheep dip seemed like the best company in the world. Then I’d go home and throw myself on a bed that was in the same condition as when I had dragged myself out of it that morning.
McIntyre’s poetic presence caused quite a stir in the parish, and quite a commotion in my soul. All the time he remained in bed, and I remained at the door, as he lectured me about life. I was 23. His message was as expected; Carpe diem! I tried to explain to him that my life as a teacher was dull; it was the thing from which I most wanted to escape. I was alienated without understanding why. McIntyre brought clarity to the subject.
“Clearly,” he declared one evening, “your teaching life is a place where you don’t belong.” And indeed it proved true. Some years afterwards I began life again, as a writer, and through the years we remained friends.
I have sought his company in troubled times, and sat by the flickering embers of many fires with him, drinking wine. He gave me a tree one time, a bay tree, which still grows so full in Leitrim that we call it the McIntyre tree, although we have to take a saw to it each year to keep it in check. I have seen him sometimes at Lough Sheelin’s shore in the ghostly twilight, out beneath the beech trees among the horses, gathering kindling for his evening fire, like a monk intense in his prayerful ritual, or at early morning picking blackberries, with the enthusiasm of a child.
But it is his work that interests me. His plays, books and poems are a celebration of love, and the unruly nature of love, and his work is always comic in the grand sense, and always underpinned by an optimistic hope that the universe will mind us.
I found all that extremely helpful, because no one sang much about love in the sour, semen-reeking Ireland where I was awakened and schooled; that grotty place of cigarette butts, bicycle sheds, and male sweat in the changing rooms.
McIntyre’s poetry proclaims love to be always worth the risk; the extra step certain to transport us to unknown places, and brings us out of ourselves.
In his storytelling, love always drives the train, upsets the apple carts, is always mischievous, and knows no other law but to walk over the cliff blindfolded.
And the wonderful thing about Ireland is that despite the Famine, the weather, the clergy and the banks, we still possess the brazen optimism to engage with each other, to mind each other, and hope for love around the next corner.
“There was this trapdoor,” McIntyre once wrote, “at one end of the loft. And nothing would do me but find it – even if I didn’t know I was searching for it . . . I rambled my way to it – the foxglove looking at me, the clover smelling, the daisies basking, the buttercups shiny – and the trap door somehow not fastened – I’m gone, 15-foot drop to the stable below. A lap of hay was all that saved me. It wasn’t, they said, supposed to be there – but it was.
“I was asked once, ‘What do you believe in?’ A lap of hay, I said.”
In the present darkness I often recall those lines. I have learned them by heart. Because maybe our innate condition is darkness, and maybe the grave is the ultimate end of our aspirations, and maybe the sun will eventually burn out, but as my Chinese friend says: “‘I’ is not human, only ‘We’ can become human.”
So that’s what I said to McIntyre last week: May it always be there for you, and for me, and for the whole country – that lap of hay.