The Stars of Ballymenone, New Edition

Henry Glassie

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780253022547
• eBook ISBN: 9780253022622
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the time of the Troubles, when bombs blew through the night and soldiers prowled down the roads, Henry Glassie came to the Irish borderland to learn how country people endure through history. He settled into the farming community of Ballymenone, beside Lough Erne in the County Fermanagh, and listened to the old people. For a decade he heard and recorded the stories and songs in which they outlined their culture, recounted their history, and pictured their world. In their view, their world was one of love, defeat, and uncertainty, demanding the virtues of endurance: faith, bravery, and wit.

Glassie's task in this book is to set the scene, to sketch the backdrop and clear the stage, so that Hugh Nolan and Michael Boyle, Peter Flanagan, Ellen Cutler, and their neighbors can tell their own tale, which explains their conditions and converts them into a tragedy of conflict and a comedy of the absurd. It gathers the saints and warriors, and celebrates the stars whose wit enabled endurance in days of violence and deprivation.

With patience and respect, Glassie describes life in a time and a place exactly like no other, and yet Ballymenone is like a thousand other places where people work on the land during the day and tell their own tales at night, forgotten, while the men of power fill the newspapers and history books by sending poor boys out to be killed.

The Stars of Ballymenone is an integrated analysis of the complete repertory of verbal art from a rural community where storytelling and singing of quality remained a part of daily life.

1

Remains

HUGH NOLAN, MY STAR of the Irish twilight, died on November 14, 1981. A curt note from a nurse at the Erne Hospital told me. She had no one else to write to, and I stood, the paper in my hands, while my mind gathered around the fact. He was an old man, and old men die. That is how it is, people come and go. Then, slowly, like fog in the night, understanding came over me, and I broke down and wept. No death has hit me harder. I knew what the world lost in his passing.

I had come to his place, Ballymenone, in the County Fermanagh, at the southwestern edge of Northern Ireland, to learn how country people endure in violent times. It was 1972, the bloodiest year of the Troubles. Every day, I walked out of the lovely town of Enniskillen, stepping to the hedge when armored cars hurtled past, turning in along familiar lanes to wander the low hills that pitch and drift beside the Arney River. Walking, I got to know every dog, bog, and pass, every farm, every house, every person who lived there, and, a practiced hand at agricultural labor, I worked with them, clamping turf and rooking hay. When questions built up, I took the old cart track over Drumbargy Brae, whistling reels, swinging my sack from shoulder to shoulder without breaking stride, and, happy with anticipation, came down to Hugh Nolan’s house by the roadside.

His grandfather built it, a small brick house, whitewashed without, smoked inside to every shade of black. Mr. Nolan lived in one of its two dark rooms. By day he sat at the corner of the wide hearth, tending the fire beside him, feeding it new turf and splashes of oil from an old tin can. An iron crane reached over the smolder, a black kettle dangled from a black chain. His back was bent, and when he rose he had to rock back to look forward, making his way over the treacherous clay floor between the sharp edges of furniture: from the hearth to the bucket of turf by the door, from the table with the shaving mirror and brass candlestick to the table with the bread, from his hard chair to the ruined couch by the fire where he slept at night.

When I arrived, he was there in the corner, his cap and coat as black as the house. I unpacked the gifts bought on my journey: a wedge of cheese, fluffy sweet cakes wrapped in cellophane, two black bottles of stout. I draped another old coat over his powerful shoulders, and knelt to the fire, making our tea. When we were done, and I had washed the cups and spoons, I settled onto the thing he used for a bed. The white cat came to rest, purring on my knee, and I asked the first question. Mr. Nolan cracked a match, sucking the flame into the remains in his pipe, thinking, then put it aside to say, “Well now, I’ll tell ye the way it is. . . .”

Age lined his face, the creases blackened with soot, but his eyes were as clear and bright as a child’s—a sign at the scuffed surface of the fine light of his mind—and his words came forth in orderly array, unrushed and precise. Words, he believed, are precious: be careful, be clear, speak the truth; words are all we have to make connections among us, shaping affection, building society. His answers presumed a serious question; they spread with detail and moved smoothly to completion.

Hugh Nolan was born in this house on December 26, 1896. He had traveled to Scotland as a farm laborer and worked the dirt of his own home place, all the while observing, taking, he said, a mental note of what mattered. He had listened to the elders and studied with the masters of his youth, Hugh McGiveney and Richard Corrigan, accumulating information critically, becoming wise. His neighbors called him a great historian. He was my prime guide to the culture of Ballymenone, the best teacher I have ever known.

On our first days together, I listened and took notes. When, in good time, the tape recorder came out, all Mr. Nolan said was that he did not want to record anything harmful to the neighbors. So I showed him the button that stopped the reels from spinning. He never used it, but he paused to be sure the machine was going before he spoke, and during that first year, and all the years that followed, the tapes piled up, the notebooks filled. Slowly, what he knew I learned, and what one old man could know stunned me to tears at his death.

The last time I saw him, it was a few days before Christmas at the Erne Hospital in Enniskillen. He had always refused to be taken away. The heat in the hospital scorched him, he said, and he missed the freedom of his own wee house. But kind people worried around him. Mrs. Corrigan, his neighbor, who brought him hot meals, who read him my letters and wrote his replies, and the nurse who came to visit and the doctor to whom she reported—all had tried to convince him. For years he resisted, then, wonderful rational old man, he thought it over, realizing that he could be robbed, that he could be burned, that he could die alone, and when the doctor began his argument again, Mr. Nolan consented.

Neat rows of metal beds stood on the polished floor. A television flickered at the end of the ward. A green tree glowed with red lights. All he owned had been reduced to the contents of a single slim drawer in the washstand beside his bed. Tidy nurses slipped in and out, bearing stainless-steel trays with coils of clear plastic tubing, chromium clamps, sharp needles, and vials of pale fluid. Old men dozed and sat alone and wandered the aisles in bathrobes. We talked about history. His life’s consolation, Hugh Nolan said, had been “keepin the truth” and “tellin the whole tale.”

A hundred times I had risen from his hearth, a hundred times he had come with me to the door, wishing me God’s blessing as I walked Rossdoney Lane away from him. Now he swung the metal walker before him through the slick corridors to the lobby of the hospital. Gray rain streaked the glass. Good old man, he never had the bad taste to become intimate, but I looked into his eyes and said, “I love you, Hugh.”

“I know,” he replied.

No words were left unsaid, the circle closed gently, but I had hoped Mr. Nolan would see the big book I was writing to tell what I had learned in Ballymenone. The first book, All Silver and No Brass, an account of Christmas mumming, had pleased him and my other generous teachers: “I love me book,” Ellen Cutler said; “The book is great,” Peter Flanagan said; and a published book persuaded their neighbors that my work among them was serious. While the big book, a garrulous ethnography called Passing the Time in Ballymenone, rumbled through the press, I compiled a small one on the model of Lady Gregory’s admirable Kiltartan History Book. Shorn of analysis, rendered down to the texts local people would find engaging, Irish Folk History was designed as a gift to the community, and I sent the first copy to Hugh Nolan. It was returned, unopened and marked “addressee deceased,” from the Erne Hospital.

Every household received the small book, and it delights me to find it disheveled from use when I visit. The big book landed in the homes of my principal teachers, there to be wrapped up and packed away. On the odd occasion, it was brought out to show the photographs it contained, their places marked by stains at the edge, but reading it was another matter. Reading is an antisocial act, and, though everyone was literate, the only reader in the place, William Lunny, told me he had to curtain the window and turn the lamp down low if he wanted a night alone with a book.

One group of young men assembled around the book’s bulk—more than eight hundred dense, frantically footnoted pages—and they took it to the priest, asking him to tell them what they should think about it. They told me he kept it a long time, then gave it back, saying, “You should be grateful. This man knows everything about you, but he didn’t say it.” I knew about moral lapses, I knew who made the bombs, but I talked about the present, as the old men did, through the indirection of historical analogy, leaving the living safe from reprisal.

No honest book can avoid all danger, all harm, and no one could live as long as I did in Ballymenone without forming friendships, developing opinions, taking sides, but, in writing, injurious facts can be suppressed, compassionate explanation can muffle the shock, and balance is not impossible. The local papers, the Reporter and the Herald, though opposed in political orientation, both published lengthy and overly kind reviews. Among the people, the main problem was envy. I divided the royalties, of course, among my chief teachers, and some of their neighbors overestimated the cash that scholarly books earn. But the sums were small, my loyalties firm, and I mailed the checks in time for Christmas. “I’ve lived a long time,” Hugh Patrick Owens told me, “and I always thought royalties was sons of bitches, but now I come to learn that royalties mean a lock of drinks at Christmas.”

I sent the books across the ocean, and seven months after Mr. Nolan’s death, I was in Ballymenone once more, sitting with tea in the gleaming clean kitchen of Francy Corrigan’s grand home. He is one of the district’s big farmers, a hard worker whose white shirt swept reflected light across the sagging black ceiling at Hugh Nolan’s when we were inside talking and he passed by on his tractor. Francy told me he thought it was Hugh’s heart, for he died suddenly while taking his tea.

The key to the lock on the door was lost, so Paddy Quigley, who bought Hugh’s small farm for its land, loaned me a crowbar so I could pry the lock away and enter. His cane lay across the settle where I sat to record his words. A pair of socks hung over the crane at the hearth where he accepted me as an apprentice, teaching me as Hugh McGiveney taught him. The hearth where I stooped to make his tea was silted with soot and ash and rust and mold. When I lifted the kettle, it came apart in my hands. Around me, a moist darkness was pulling everything back to the earth. Furniture tilted on rotting feet. Cardboard boxes of sodden paper melted toward the clay floor.

Among the papers, I found letters from convents, thanking him for his weekly gifts. I sent him money to ease his hard life, and he sent it away to help others. In a soot-blackened, hand-stitched fragment of an antique geography book, I found the certificate of a pious vow he had made and an old letter from me saying I would be back in Ireland to see him soon.

Black pictures hung on black walls, holy pictures, for he was a saint. Big drums crumbled in a dim corner, for he loved music and the old Ballymenone marching band had stored its instruments in the room he did not use. I stood in the cell of my master, and the terrible clot of grief in my chest began to dissolve into melancholy. Hugh Nolan is gone. He told me what he could and left behind the first phase of an archaeological site, still standing, beginning to fall. Only the crockery on the dresser remained hard and white. Everything else softened and darkened, decaying beneath a thickening layer of soot and rot, seeking the earth.

I found a big penny and gave it to Francy’s boy who remembered Hugh, a bent old man on a stick with a lot of cats. I took a mug from the dresser. Transfer-printed with birds in blue, chipped and lacking a handle, it is ware of a kind once made in Belleek and displayed on the dresser that stood across from the hearth in pretty country kitchens, now to be found in shards among the nettles at the sites of old dwellings.

As I had done so many times before, I walked away from Hugh Nolan’s, turned uphill, and crossed the fields to Peter Flanagan’s. During my first year, I had slept in the town to remain unaligned, and my neutrality served me as I got to know everyone, tracing out the networks of affinity, tracking the patterns of cooperative work and night visiting, puzzling kinship together, unriddling political opinion, and drawing maps of fields and plans of houses. But neutrality can be sustained for only so long, my foreignness failed me, and on the visits that followed, averaging one a year, I stayed with Peter and Joseph Flanagan, with my pals P and Joe, sleeping beneath a heap of blankets and old coats in a tiny, dank room off the kitchen.

Peter welcomed me to the fire, and we drew ourselves together with talk of the past, remembering our first day a decade before, when we talked about music, remembering our last visit, a week after Joe’s death. He gave me news of the neighbors. James Owens who told me tales of ancient warfare, Jamesie died in January. John Carson has moved a mobile home onto the Hill Head in Drumbargy, “the longest house in the world,” Peter said. John had borrowed Peter’s copy of Passing the Time in Ballymenone, and P complimented me more than necessary, praising the book’s “complication” and its “truth.” He brought to the hearth the wooden flute he played when he was the band’s star musician. While the sweet, sad notes ascended, the fire provided us a wavering halo of pink light. For a moment it felt as though nothing had happened. We made tea and talk and got another night behind us.

Peter was the last to go. His letters stopped coming, but he cashed the checks I sent, and then the silence was complete. I thought he was dead, but one night in 1991 my friend Bryan Gallagher was passing through the ward at the Erne Hospital when a gaunt old man stopped him. Bryan did not recognize him, but, “I am Peter Flanagan,” he said. “For God’s sake, tell the Yank I’m alive.” Bryan called, and I booked a flight. In Enniskillen, the nurse told me he had been released. His old home on the windy ridge was locked, abandoned, and the neighbors sent me into unfamiliar territory, south of the Arney. On the road, I met a man I did not know, who knew me as the man that wrote the book. He directed me to the home of Jim McManus, saying it would be the last time I would see P Flanagan.

Mr. and Mrs. McManus fed him and kept him clean. We laughed when we met, and for two days Peter and I reminisced, drinking tea and telling old tales, remembering, and then we parted. Soon his mind snapped free of the world, his body gave up. The obituary in the Herald stressed his musical talent, telling how he had marched in the band “in the early days of the struggle for independence,” identifying him as the teacher of the great fluter Cathal McConnell, as a major source for my “now famous” book. Peter Flanagan made it to the great age of eighty-six. He was the last mummer, God bless him, the last star, the end of a generation. They are all gone now.

What remains are scraps and fragments: a broken mug from Hugh Nolan’s dresser; an iron trivet, smithed out of three horseshoes, given to me by Mrs. Cutler; a handmade brick, given to me by Hugh Patrick Owens; nearly three thousand photographs and more than three thousand pages of field notes; a plan of everyone’s house; transcriptions from tape of every song and story they knew, the full repertory of verbal art from a lost generation in a small Irish place. There are also three books about their community, and a fourth, Irish Folktales, containing still more stories by Hugh Nolan, Peter and Joseph Flanagan, Ellen Cutler, and Michael Boyle. Now I add a fifth, taking another cut through data that remain unexhausted, writing because I must.

Early in his anguished masterpiece, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, the patron saint of travelers across social divides, wrote that it would be better not to write, better to offer up fragments: photographs, recordings of speech, pieces of wood and cotton and iron. But those scraps of the real could not convey the reality; they would be assimilated to old understandings. Agee had to write, and since he did, we know something of what it was like to be poor in Alabama in 1936. Late in Tristes Tropiques, which twins with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as a monumental accomplishment and subversion of the ethnographer’s craft, Claude Lévi-Strauss concludes that it is hopeless. Memory and fatigue will distort the traveler’s perceptions, and only the believable in the traveler’s tale will be believed: its news, its disturbing truths, its revolutionary potential will be lost. But Lévi-Strauss wrote anyway, so we know something about the Bororo and Nambikwara, about life in the back country of Brazil between 1935 and 1939. Writing will fail, but there is nothing else to be done. The photographs, the records of speech, the artifacts gathered for the museum will not suffice on their own. Words must march out to defeat, forming lines across paper in the belief that some of the reality will filter through their accumulation.

I wish my words would sound like a wooden flute in the night, feel like a steel chain on a farmgate in winter, smell like bogwater, but, a pupil of Hugh Nolan’s, I must be content with a striving for truth, composing in this book, out of my experience, an essay on the significance of place and time and creativity in the culture of people who live by working the earth. Here, as in the books that have gone before, I take my stand, doing what I can to undermine the prejudice, held by thinkers to the right and thinkers to the left, against the rural poor. My angle is historical.

I write of a time when the dead were yet alive, a past era marked by two sets of conditions. It was a time of violence. The year I came began with Bloody Sunday, and the Troubles continued, setting rural life in a context of political conflict, of bombings and killings, rage and fear. It was a time of deprivation, when the technologies of the modern, long a comfort in other places, were only beginning to come to Ballymenone. When I arrived in 1972, there was no plumbing or central heat or electricity, no telephones, no televisions to trap folks at home, few cars to carry them away to the delights of the town. People labored through the day, hefting iron pots, turning the soil with spades, and they gathered at night by the fire to chat. Electricity came in 1976, making the place, in Mr. Nolan’s words, a forest of poles. Televisions followed, and Hugh Nolan and Elle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Remains
• Our District of the Country
• An Epic of Common Life
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes to the Book
• Notes to the Compact Disc
• Bibliography
• Index