Foreword

Colm Tóibín

The man who came to the podium in the large modern lecture hall at University College Dublin in October 1972 was exceedingly tall. He seemed steely and distant and formidable. Despite his name, which was an ordinary southern Irish name, his aura bore the hallmark perhaps of a great house, a place of custom and ceremony with a vast library, old books and pictures.

A year later he would write that he had come to believe that each of us, students embarking on the study of English literature, should, before we were allowed into the department, be asked a simple question upon which everything might depend: to name a passage from a poem or a novel or a play which would make our hair stand on end, which would make us shiver. He imagined, with a sense of wondrous disbelief, what would happen should one of us quote these eight lines from John Crowe Ransom’s ‘The Equilibrists’:

In Heaven you have heard no marriage is,

No white flesh tinder to your lecheries,

Your male and female tissue sweetly shaped

Sublimed away, and furious blood escaped.

Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones

Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;

Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,

The pieces kiss again, no end to this.

It was hard looking around Theatre M, part of the recently built complex, modern and anodyne, of the Arts Block of University College Dublin, that October morning and studying the students, the accidental and incoherent presences who had left their breakfast tables to come to their first English lecture, and imagining that either the tone or the sentiments in Ransom’s poem would have fired them. But all of us, in some way, had been fired by something, some sense of the mystery and beauty of language or some sense of ourselves as readers, or potential readers, to cause us to be here rather than in the science lab cutting up frogs or at the commerce lecture cutting up ledgers.

We lived, some of us anyway, in a state where those eight lines from Ransom, or lines like them, might potentially move us more than we could say, and the gap between that emotion and its due expression would, we would soon learn, be enough to puzzle us and contain us for all of our lives.

The man, the professor, had by this time taken command of the lectern. There must have been a microphone because the hall was very large but I have no memory of his voice as amplified or in any way distorted. I remember only his first words. He began without explanation or introduction:

One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death’. The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, ‘Oh, nonsense!’ and stood over him as if transfixed.

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror – of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –

‘The horror! The horror!’

I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly, the manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt –

‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead.’

Denis Donoghue’s voice was dramatic but the tone was not declamatory – it allowed for mystery and quietness. The accent might have been Irish, but the pronunciation of some consonants was strange, almost Am