The clay moves awry...:
Gallery, Sean
THE CLAY MOVES AWRY... AND DEMON HORDES ARE BORN SEAN CALLERY A woman stands at the subway entrance near my office in Manhattan every day. She holds a sign written in black on soiled brown...
...I was plainly an unwelcome intruder gauged by the standards of that habitat...
...It was my only resounding success, vocationally speaking...
...He has recently completed a novel entitled...
...That long day ended after a number of interviews with persons who stared long and hard at computer screens and shuffled through the many papers accumulated during the day...
...I felt more of a failure than ever...
...No rejection had ever been, or would ever be, so humiliating as being told they didn't want to buy my blood...
...For two decades or more I had pursued a career of professional drinking...
...You 've had real responsibility," she shouted, glaring at some waiting applicants, "You're not like these others...
...Peter's square in the sedia gestatoria...
...The building's complement included royalty...
...She became obsequious...
...a thousand sins Made them our Master's long before we came...
...I had alienated friends and family, actual and potential employers-all but the marginal people as fond of the grape as I was...
...He told me that "people like you" are rare here...
...For the tawdry reasons mentioned earlier in this little piece, I thought I understood Yeats's lovely play-understood as a good actor must, in his guts...
...But sometimes-though His hand is on it stillIt moves awry and demon hordes are born...
...But I still have my faith...
...With the true drinker's unerring instinct, I had located a fellow traveler...
...I remember a man on a landing shouting down at a mass of us huddled below...
...The blood banks required a waiting period before they would buy a pint for five dollars, a cup of coffee, and a doughnut...
...Most of its denizens were openly on narcotics and the presence of a common drunk diluted its chic...
...Many more years have passed and my mode of living is different...
...When we grew up, perhaps in another decade or two, we could turn our attention to straightening out the world...
...I was given a subway token and a small check for the immediate purchase of food...
...Her familiarity, not only with the works themselves, but with the fabled writers, was dazzling...
...She was condescending and contemptuous by turns until she found an old pay stub among my papers indicating I had once worked for a very important and famous government official...
...The lady's name was Jill...
...My brains were awash in the wake of a twenty-year alcoholic binge...
...There were fewer mitigating circumstances to explain my dereliction...
...My last sale to them was too recent for me to climb up those rickety stairs in the midst of Times Square squalor...
...And demon hordes are born...
...The countess is rich...
...The subway token was, after all, negotiable...
...A man repeatedly approached her, shouting as he drank from a large wine bottle...
...But the difficulties surrounding that calling at last did me in...
...I go to an office and pass the woman and her children...
...And demon hordes are born.g directly at the passersby...
...I do not ask a price...
...We lived on large brown buns, bacon, sausages, Brussels sprouts, odd tasting potatoes, and cups and more cups of peculiarly excellent tea...
...I had miscalculated once and been told to return in a few days...
...I walked back to the village in the continuing downpour...
...One Eyed Reilly...
...He was subdued and led away eventually, but not before he urinated on the floor, broke his bottle on the radiator, and lunged at the woman and her baby...
...The peasants are given a choice: sell your souls for food or starve to death...
...One event best describes the state of the national larder...
...I am desolate Because of a strange thought that's in my heart...
...Bed linen was frigid, partially ameliorated by hot water bottles, called "Irish pigs," that lost their warmth long before morning...
...The harangue continued: "Don't you understand English...
...A rent strike was in progress and a bright banner hanging from my fire escape read, "Venceremos"-we will win...
...Don't you understand English...
...I had become unemployable...
...FIRST merchant: Come, deal, deal, deal...
...I was alone and without influential or interested friends...
...A thousand of the brothers Warner's violins and brass resonated on the sound track, all but drowning out the histrionic excesses of Miss Davis...
...I played Aleel, a poet who wanders through the forest mad from hunger and watching others die of starvation...
...They were devoured anyway...
...Countess Cathleen is a metaphor for Ireland, a spokeswoman for what our prosaic chief executive might call a "kinder, gentler" world...
...AND DEMON HORDES ARE BORN SEAN CALLERY A woman stands at the subway entrance near my office in Manhattan every day...
...It is but for charity We buy such souls at all...
...A social worker screamed at a frightened woman: "You were supposed to have these papers notarized...
...Europe was in ashes, but so was Hitler, and our country had done a great deal to put him there...
...Landladies fussed over wet rectangles cut from peat bogs...
...The late, great Ria Mooney was rehearsing William Butler Yeats's The Countess Cathleen in a frigid loft somewhere behind the long since demolished Theater Royal...
...The door to my digs was padlocked and there was another padlock arrangement on the inside of the door...
...I remembered a scene between my character and the merchant...
...But I was a mere witness to desolation and returned nightly to a merchant ship and my officer's billet...
...The woman's gestures and monosyllables suggested she did not understand English...
...I'm talking to you in plain English...
...An educated accent, vocabulary, and white skin elicited a measurably different response from the personnel at the welfare center...
...Numbness and fear, as well as the drink, diminished my powers of observation...
...When Europe recovered, under Uncle Sam's tutelage, we could turn our attention to the renovation of Asia...
...The locals explained the unpleasant taste of the ubiquitous potato...
...We had suffered with dear Bette Davis as a Somerset Maugham heroine in mortal combat with some wily Malay States Orientals...
...My wife had lost the battle of the bottle and plummeted into an early grave...
...They are mute and avoid looking directly at the passersby...
...I was about to be evicted and was totally without funds...
...She holds a sign written in black on soiled brown cardboard: "Help Me Feed My "A Children Today...
...If memory serves, it ended when a photographer pasted my picture to an identification card...
...I had lately seen a few of Europe's ruined cities and been fought over by emaciated rickshaw drivers in Calcutta...
...Rehearsing Yeats, she would comment on ill-advised revisions the poet had made and restore the original text...
...The films were an education of sorts...
...any years later, bits of the play's text haunted me and I certainly understood it better...
...We were still liberators and benefactors-to ourselves anyway...
...In the play, merchants are buying souls in a time of famine...
...There was a great deal of wet snow, for Ireland, and no central heating in frigid houses...
...Ria had played some of the Sean O'Casey ladies in their very first performance at the Abbey Theater...
...she hailed from someplace in County Galway...
...It was bleak by American SEAN CALLERY is a long-time contributor to Commonweal and has written many articles and reviews for Time, Saturday Review, and the New York Times Magazine...
...The term "ugly American" was not yet coined...
...Clearly she had more respect for people who had destroyed their own producti ve 1 i ves than for the many who never had a chance...
...When students entered a tiered classroom, they encountered ascending rows of young people barely visible behind the clouds of steam their warm breaths created in the morning cold and dampness...
...After many short exchanges with officials, I was at last interrogated by a lady with rimless glasses and a commanding West Indian accent...
...They stare up at the peaks of uncompleted skyscrapers and are silent, excepting a soft "thank you" as a coin falls into a cup at the woman's feet...
...Somewhere along the line, I was interviewed by a psychiatrist whose hands shook more than those of a hungover alcoholic before the morning's first drink...
...None could imagine what havoc those attitudes, translated into foreign policy, would bring about during our lifetimes...
...I went from desk to desk and floor to floor, at one point sharing a bench with a young woman with an infant in her arms...
...The many years separating me from that afternoon have blurred the memory...
...I surely understood the play better than I did those many years before in that Dublin loft...
...She holds the sign "Help Me Feed My Children Today...
...An upended metal coffin perched on stilts in the kitchen-a shower...
...In reality, we were only less comfortable than we had been in Brooklyn, Wilkes-Barre, and Upper Snowbank...
...In Dublin, just after World War II, a few American students were coping with more difficult living conditions than they expected...
...CATHLEEN: Old man, old man, He never closed a door Unless one opened...
...Children surround the woman...
...My home was in a crumbling tenement at the western frontier of Greenwich Village...
...There was no coal for room grates and the turf, usually reserved for farmhouse kitchens, was still damp from an overly moist summer...
...The process would begin all over again...
...Together we defied His Majesty's disapproval, ignored the drug pushers, and quite often spent the evenings drinking anything we could get our hands on...
...It was headline news, replete with pictures of bales of onions being unloaded at Ringsend...
...Most of my activity in those days was play acting and looking for more of the same...
...From his sidewalk throne, our king glared at passersby and at me and one other tenant in particular...
...For surely He does not forsake the world, But stands before it modeling in the clay And molding there His image...
...standards but palatial compared to the city beyond the gates that always surrounded the docks...
...A year later, I was in Ireland...
...After a disastrous interlude cutting fabrics in a way that sent a supervisor into the streets screaming, the temporary agency banished me from its employment rolls...
...On fine days an elderly gentleman was borne in an armchair from one of the apartments to the sidewalk...
...walked through an autumn downpour to a welfare center...
...Age by age The clay wars with His fingers and pleads hard For its old, heavy, dull and shapeless ease...
...There were no onions in the shops for many months...
...With the odious attitudes of youth, I imagined I was suffering real deprivation...
...I thought about The Countess Cathleen and Dublin...
...The tempters boast they are agents of the "Master of all merchants...
...The accompanying pomp recalled newsreels I saw in childhood of Pope Pius XII 's being carried around St...
...He called us cowardly swine, willing victims, worthless human beings, and threatened to hurl himself down into our midst...
...It came to an end...
...She gives away her fortune and sells her own soul to set free the souls the evil merchants have bought...
...therefore be silent...
...The far reaches of that conceit embraced the barbarous East...
...Potatoes had been frozen in the earth, altering their flavor...
...We Americans endured cold, damp feet and hands all day long...
...At one point in the play there is this exchange: old peasant: God forsakes us...
...One evening stands out in my memory...
...The monotony of the food available to spoiled, gluttonous Yanks was another disappointment...
...She and dozens of mustachioed Empire types from central casting shouldered the white man's burden in many a lurid melodrama...
...ALEEL: Here, take my soul, for I am tired of it...
...Then a freighter arrived from Egypt with a cargo of the fondly remembered staple...
...Memories of long ago assail me each time I see that sad brood...
...Sometimes they lit up for a few moments and quickly died out...
...I was a member of an elite after a long period of being at the bottom of the social scale...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 17
