Read Online Algren at Sea by Nelson Algren - Free Book Online Page B

finding evidence.
    Everyone in the bar felt pleased with himself, after the officers left with a warning, for having outwitted the law. It struck me, however, that the Dublin Police Department is not so well organized as that of Chicago, where an owner would have had a full hour’s warning of a raid instead of ten minutes.
    Then the music began and the dancing began and the drinking began and the singing began, with the green juke taking the lead—
    Goodbye, goodbye, County Mayo
    â€œFed up,” Mary repeated, “everything.”
    But this time just to herself.
    I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen They Must Have Made Angels in Ireland for My Mother Came from There —the whole tinpan vale of Glocca Morra, along with the Vale of Tralee, doesn’t work anymore. The young Kathleen Mavourneens as well as the Mikes pack up overnight and leave Dublin as though they had never had a friend there; and never write home as though they had never had a home.
    â€œGone to America” is the word some leave chalked on a broken farm-house.
    Broken farms left to turn to earth on the great unused stretches of Irish land that there is none to work.
    â€œGone to America” is the unseen legend left above the Dublin tenement door where some girl who says “Fed up,” gets fed up at last.
    Ten millions of people once lived in a country that now supports less than half the population of Chicago: a people whose fresh magic was a wonder and a light are going into that good night.
    The Germans, whom the world could better spare, may bring in neighborly little Volkswagens to distribute from Ireland’s ocean ports, to make more work and better pay for many Marys and Mikes, as well as effecting great savings for German enterprise.
    If The Ancient Nation says good night in a Volkswagen, that will be a prettier sight.
    I can’t wait till Mary sees Pasadena.
    Â 
    Dublin is part city and part high-noon sky whose clouds as white as ocean sails veer changefully between sun-wave and rain across a changeful sea.
    Till evening cracks Heaven with the sad hues of old stained glass. Then mad saints long-martyred, and the memory of them among men, seem equally cracked. This twilit sky is the work of painters of holy dusks, everyone drunk or cracked. However so holy, all drunken.
    All cracked.
    To subdivide this sky for television, partition it for air rights or pierce it with a skyscraper, partakes of blasphemy here. But “blasphemy is the comic verse of belief ” the aphorist Behan comments. The Irish are already
sufficiently apprehensive about the world about them. Though they name their apprehension reverence.
    So when the low roofs are huddling in the cold like shawlies at prayer, bolder souls go to MacDaid’s to challenge pope, priests, and saints—it is dark in there and MacDaid won’t inform on them.
    Dubliners divide their lives largely between pew and pub. Some are faithful to both, going drunken to Mass and atoning later in Guinness.
    â€œIf a man is horrified by another’s sins,” Behan believes, “it is because he is uneducated, inexperienced and a hypocrite. Certain things must be restrained in the world for our convenience—but for our convenience only. Why can’t we let it go at that?”
    I had come to Ireland at the time that the Liverpool whores were coming over the water to see Ireland whip Wales at rugby. The subject of the day, everywhere, was Ireland’s chances.
    It was a very important contest, I understood from Mr. Montague, because of the present low state of Irish morale, what with Scotch outselling Irish whiskey in New York. Yet, in the highly unlikely circumstance that Wales should actually win, please to bear in mind that Gaels, true Gaels, never play rugby at all. That being a sport devised by British begrudgers.
    The Irish squad was therefore made up wholly of players from the North Counties, every begrudger of them a Black Protestant. Thus