All port cities are places of tension: on the one hand, the river flowing down from the hinterlands brings with it people and stories from the deep country upstream; on the other hand, in from the sea come invaders and traders, sailors and generals and common soldiers, travellers borne in on the tide from the world-girdling ocean.
Holding the balance between these two sources of story, the people of a port city will always find themselves dancing between native and alien, between kin and stranger – and the only way to resolve these tensions is to construct a story of themselves.
Think of Cadiz, that Phoenician outpost in the west, or Marseilles, or Genoa or Piraeus. Port cities draw history inwards, send history outwards, and because the horizons are always both local and vast the stories are always both hermetic and archetypal, the scale balanced between myth and the homely.
My own native place is one such modest city, and everything that is good and bad about Cork as it is, and Cork as its lovers and enemies imagine it, has its roots in this double pulse, this instinct to make myth of the ordinary and the cancelling instinct to cut the mythic down to human size.
On the positive side this makes for a city relaxed in its sense of itself and given to making heroes of its people. Sceptical but welcoming, building up layers of shared traditions and kinship, a city sufficient to itself can afford to be curious about the world outside, can afford to welcome the stranger for the sake of novelty, provocation and entertainment. On the dark side, so to speak, there is always the contrary pull towards hermetic self-satisfaction, towards a near toxic sense of its own importance.
Such cities are the ideal birthplaces of the storyteller.
The city I grew up in was a city that demanded unquestioning love, unquestioning surrender to the pervasive unstated belief that there could not possibly be on Earth a finer place to live. I was, of course, happy to offer my love to my native place, as who would not be?
This love, looking back on it now, was at its most intense during my teenage years, when I walked every hill and valley of it, every street and lane and suburb. To be young, penniless, restless and curious in a compact city is to be fated to walk – and how we walked. Even now I can pick out the shortest route between any two points in the city.
I can guide you to the part of the quay wall between the Coal Quay and North Gate Bridge where the limestone capping is worn to a shine by the patched elbows of poachers who’d gather there to watch the salmon run.
I can describe to you in minute detail the wine-soaked premises of John Daly & Sons, long since vanished, that stood across the road, the vertical bars on its office windows, the sagging wooden gates into the warehouse, the skirt of moss and algae creeping up its walls like a fresco of distant mountains.
Of course I already knew, in the most intimate detail, the streets and lanes of my own local place – Redemption Road, Water Lane and Mahony’s Square, Madden’s Buildings, Great William O’Brien Street, Blackpool Bridge – and each little patch had bit by bit stitched itself into my day-to-day life, hurling and running messages, going to Fitzharris the barber, seeing the familiar faces of milkman, neighbour and postman, schoolmates and relatives, the little world that takes on the glow of what is necessary and somehow fore-ordained.
But, in my teenage years, I began to deliberately walk down the centre of the city, cycle to the peripheries, began consciously to assemble a map of the city in its entirety.
Why? I am still not sure. It was instinct, certainly, but it was also prompted by starting to read Frank O’Connor and Seán Ó Faoláin: I wanted to test the city as it actually was, or seemed to be, against the stage they had made of it, the setting for their stories. I wanted to test my own budding impulse to make poems and stories against the place I assumed I would write about.
I remember a Sunday walk, schoolboys dodging evening Mass, that saw Mick Hannigan, Jim O'Brien and myself turn on a whim into the lit sanctuary of the Long Valley, the silence as we walked the length of the bar to the great round table. I remember Humphrey considering us, then telling us we could have a glass of shandy, "and that's all for now".
I remember, coming out again into Winthrop Street, the feeling of having made our way through to an unsuspected layer of the city, the pubs of adult life and all that would entail; I remember the sense I had then of the new mysteries we would encounter, the inevitable initiations and bargains that would be proposed to us.
I could see myself living and dying in that city; I could sense ahead of me the life in this safe and sufficient place that was on offer. More – and this is a signal characteristic of the city – I could already sense that this adult life, too, was somehow fore-ordained, that it was expected, taken for granted, that I would live out my life here. Being strict with my memory, I see that already I was uneasy with this prospect.
If one sentence, one question, encapsulates the Corkonian’s attitude to his or her native city it is: “Sure why would you want to live anywhere else?” It is, in fact, a fair enough question.
The Cork of my teenage years was about the same size as the Athens of Pericles, had a sense of itself that closely resembled the self-evident self-sufficiency of Florence in the 14th century. We had our merchants, our local princes, our republican martyrs; we had a fascinating geography to rival the seven hills of Rome, we had strong industry, the verdant Lee Valley to the back of us and the sea before us.
We had our university and our cathedrals, our schools and our opera house, our art gallery, our close nets of kinship, a confident working class, a not-too-toxic middle class and a great deal of music, theatre and the country’s pre-eminent hurling team. If I hadn’t been born there I can think of few places I might be more drawn to as a place in which to live.
But I was born there, and that has made all the difference. You can come to know a place too well. You can become so locked into those nets of kinship that it becomes difficult to breathe. The streets and lanes and alleyways can close in on you, paradise can become prison in the turn of a sentence, your freedom and independence be cancelled in a knowing look.
Mostly I left because I was restless, craved anonymity, wanted to travel, to see and live in as much of the world as was possible before I died. Simply, I needed some otherwhere, some distance from who I was shaped to be.
I left for my own sake, and not as a judgment on the place – but there is a stratum of the city that will not accept this, that cannot forgive those who leave, as if by leaving they were somehow betraying the place and the people. I have never understood this; such people are a stain on the generous city they profess to love.
My native place has grown into a city of magic: humane, vibrant, imaginative and open to the wide mysteries of the world. I never left it; I just live elsewhere. I go there when I can. I hold it unshakeably in my heart.
