A Way of Life, Like Any Other: A Novel

INTRODUCTION

ONE THINKS of Homer," says Joyce’s Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, mocking W.B. Yeats’s fulsome introduction to Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne, and displaying the sort of high spirits and disrespect which readers will recognize in this book also. Darcy O’Brien will make them think of Joyce. Or of Flann O’Brien. Or of what Joyce said of Flann O’Brien: That’s a real writer, with the true comic spirit.

When A Way of Life, Like Any Other was published in 1977, Darcy O’Brien was teaching at Pomona College, a tenured professor with three critical books to his name, the first one derived from his doctoral thesis on James Joyce and the other two—on the poets W.R. Rodgers and Patrick Kavanagh—the result of invitations to contribute to a series of critical monographs on Irish writers. The work he did on the poets was, as they would say in Dublin, grand; in both books, the author went through the biographical and critical motions with a nice mixture of academic correctness and the personal touch, and displayed a useful familiarity with the Irish background. There was little sense, however, that Darcy himself was hitting his stride as a writer. These were maculate performances by someone with a gift for the immaculate.

The gift was evident in his gear and his giggle, his perfect manners that masked a susceptibility to the uncensored and the incorrect. Tanned, seersuckered, elegantly shod and shoe-shined, he would arrive in Ireland every summer and move like some kind of god through the bohemian kitchens of Ranelagh and the open-hearth holiday homes of West Donegal, a Californian Apollo in the land of Philomena and Barney, Ivy Leaguer in the bâteau ivre of an after-hours pub. His level smile on such wild occasions, his at-homeness in places where he was slightly deliciously out of it, all suggested his artist’s capacity for immersion and detachment. Sooner or later the humor and judgment that flashed in his grin were bound to end up as a style.

It was only gradually that I realized how exotic a life Darcy had lived as the child of famous Hollywood stars. I am sure that A Way of Life, Like Any Other gives a heightened, necessarily overdone picture of what his childhood and adolescence were like, but it did take a while for the reality behind the book to impinge on me. Darcy didn’t mention it much. I learned about it mostly from the talk of his fellow novelist Thomas Flanagan, who spoke with an enthusiast’s conviction and an encyclopedist’s knowledge about George O’Brien’s career, his historic roles in F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise and Hamilton MacFadden’s Riders of the Purple Sage. Tom Flanagan and Darcy had met when Darcy went to Berkeley as a postgraduate student, and Flanagan’s influence (which promptly turned to friendship) was all-important in directing him toward Irish literature and in bringing him to a realization that his Scott Fitzgerald side—Princeton undergraduate, glamour-surfer—and his Joyce side—child of Catholicism, potential transubstantiator—could be brought into creative alignment.

A story I heard after Darcy’s too early death in 1998 illustrates the extent of his affiliations and the chance ways in which he came to recognize and integrate them. His mother, the actress Marguerite Churchill, was a great anglophile and gave him his first name in order to link him to the character in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. If she was intent on countering the American Irishness of the O’Brien connection, she didn’t succeed, since at Berkeley Tom Flanagan would reveal the Irish dimension of the Darcy name (wasn’t there a Mr. Bartell D’Arcy in The Dead, for a start?). In doing so the teacher is bound to have brought the student of Joyce to an awareness that the English, Irish, and American traditions constituted a kind of literary trampoline where he could exercise and excel.

The gift of tongues arrived with the first chapter of A Way of Life, Like Any Other. Casa Fiesta indeed. A jubilation, a ventriloquism, a writer figure-skating into his kingdom, his self-awareness his release. Hollywood is there in all its crazy realism, autobiography is there in all its poignant detail, but what is chiefly present is a sense of the language performing in and for and through the writer. Not that the characters don’t live a life of their own, rare yet recognizable, brilliantly convincing even in their utter boringness. In the second chapter Sterling’s paean to the avocado is a triumph, as believable as tape-recorded speech, as artful as anything in Wodehouse:

I always know I’m recovering when I can eat avocados again. I like them plain, maybe with a little lemon juice. Some people like a vinaigrette sauce. There’s no better breakfast than an avocado sliced on a piece of whole wheat toast and a cup of coffee. Black coffee, no sugar. People eat too much sugar anyway.

This is one kind of comedy—of manners, of caricature, of broad joy—and it abounds throughout the book. It’s there every time Anatol, the mother’s lover, appears; or Sam Caliban, the gambling producer; or Marshall Marshall, John Bircher, veteran of the industry and now a has-been (He’s a lonely fellow, my father said. I noticed his weight going up. He needs to get out into the fresh air). But there’s another, more sophisticated comedy going on, a connoisseur’s game of echo and allusion, a game I got wise to after I had lent the author a book I was reviewing during one of his visits to Dublin. It wasn’t long before I discovered the following passage in his work in progress:

I had been nearly two years caring for my father and had some reason to be pleased with my work. His habits were again cleanly, his house and its treasures were in order, his spirits were level, except for the periodic fit of gloom, which he often tried to conceal from me…. I would try to cheer him up with jokes or by preparing a good meal, though like sheep who are very subject to the rot if their pasture is too succulent, he thrived on the simplest fare.

There’s a touch of Flann O’Brien there perhaps, in the pedantry and the verbal tweezer-work—cleanly, subject to the rot—that holds out bits of diction for our particular inspection, but what sustains the prose and strokes its cadenced flanks is the eighteenth-century melodies of William Cowper’s account of keeping tame hares. Darcy had come across it accidentally in my review copy:

Immediately commencing carpenter, I built them houses to sleep in; each had a separate apartment, so contrived that their ordure would pass through the bottom of it; an earthen pan placed under each received whatsoever fell which being duly emptied and washed, they were thus kept perfectly sweet and clean. In the daytime they had the range of a hall, and at night retired each to his own bed, never intruding into that of another.

It’s a fair step from relishing the exquisiteness of this kind of thing to keeping faith with the drone of a hypochondriac obsessed with avocados, but O’Brien’s writing can take it all in its stride. An example of what T. S. Eliot called the complete consort dancing together.

Nowhere is the movement truer than when the author deals with the relationship between the hero and his father. Mother too is present, of course, sweetly and boozily, and the subject of the novel is to a large extent the fall and fall of two aging stars, a process we are free to regard in sociological terms as the inevitable consequence of the commercial dynamic of Hollywood, although in literary terms it asks to be understood as a distressing emotional reality, a sad eclipse of individual lives and loves. Autobiographical novel, fictionalized memoir: whether we regard the book as cri de coeur or comic turn, there is no doubting either the author’s compassion at the change in his parents’ fortune or his writerly joy in discovering they are raw material for his art. But it is in the treatment of the father that Darcy O’Brien provides the most hilarious and most heartbreaking scenes, at times the ur-stuff of the bildungsroman, at times a sly burlesque of it, at times—as at the very end—helplessly a combination of both.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, and its author went on to write a very different, soberly observed, nonautobiographical novel, The Silver Spooner (1981), set in the Oklahoma to which he had recently moved as writer-in-residence and Joyce specialist at the University of Tulsa. After that, a chance encounter with a former college friend, then working as a judge in California, started him on his first nonfiction book, and during the Eighties and early Nineties he would produce several powerful accounts of notorious or obscure crimes, the most spectacular of which (both as crime and account) was the one that initiated the series, Two of a Kind (1985), a narrative of the atrocious doings of the Hillside Stranglers in Los Angeles during the years from 1977 to 1979 and of the way they were finally brought to justice.

O’Brien’s childhood Catholicism had been lightly and sardonically present in A Way of Life, Like Any Other (the mother in the bedroom weeping and unclothed, clinging to the bedpost like Christ awaiting the scourge, the father discoursing on the value of religion and on the free doughnuts and coffee we had received after mass), but as these books continued to appear, his early religious formation seemed to reveal itself ever more seriously. His subject was beginning to be original sin, that which, according to the catechism, darkened our understanding, weakened our will and left us with a strong inclination to evil. It was therefore entirely fitting that O’Brien’s last publication should have been The Hidden Pope (1998), a book which follows the entwined life stories of Pope John Paul II and his childhood friend Jerzy Kluger. Kluger had grown up Jewish in pre-war Wadowice and was living in Rome when Karol Wojtyla was elected pope. Thus he gradually came back into John Paul’s life, first and foremost as a friend, but soon also as a valuable go-between in negotiations which the state of Israel initiated to secure formal diplomatic recognition by the Vatican. This circumstance allows the author to revisit the world of 1930s Poland, to explore how anti-Semitism was fostered by doctrinal features of the Christian tradition, and to trace the pope’s first moves toward acknowledgment of the offense and its terrible consequences.

There was a somber note in O’Brien’s later volumes; graver matter was under consideration and the disciplines of nonfiction tended to keep the personality in the background. More and more it was a case of iron in the soul rather than quicksilver in the sentence. Not that the younger man who had written the gleeful novel was not in earnest. If there was something playful about the way the inscription on the final page—"Dublin, S.S. Eurybates, Claremont, 1973–76"—nods to the inscription on the final page of Ulysses, there was some serious intent behind it too. It was not entirely a bow and a scrape. It was the author’s way of repeating what his alter ego says immediately before that, in the concluding sentence: he and his book were going into the world well-armed.

—SEAMUS HEANEY

1

CASA FIESTA

I WOULD not change the beginning for anything. I had an electric car, a starched white nanny, a pony, a bed modeled after that of Napoleon’s son, and I was baptized by the Archbishop of the diocese. I wore hats and sucked on a little pipe. I was the darling of the ranch, pleasing everyone. One day I was sunning myself in the patio, lying out on the yellow and blue tiles, contemplating the geraniums and sniffing the hot, clean air. A bee came up and stung me on my bare fanny. The response to my screams was wonderful. Servants everywhere, my mother giving orders. Don Enrique applied an old Indian remedy and my father took me down to the beach house to let the salt water do its work. Oh what a world it was! Was there ever so pampered an ass as mine?

When my father was away on location, I would go to the tack room where Don Enrique sat polishing the saddles and the bridles and the boots and get him to tell me more stories about my father, how he became an honorary Apache and shot crocodiles on the Amazon, how he was good to his horses and courted my mother making Wrong Romance. My father said that Don Enrique’s stories were true and wasn’t I lucky having such a wise old man around. Then he would tell me more stories and I would go to sleep on his big shoulder with my arms around him.

By the age of five, I could amuse my parents and their friends after dinner, when they would sit before the great eucalyptus fire drinking café diablo. Three or four cars would arrive every weekend, and it was a long drive back to Los Angeles, so people would usually stay the night. When conversation livened, my father would send the mariachis away, and I would lie back for a while, absorbing everything and making occasional comments such as Is that so? or I hadn’t realized that before until everyone would forget what I was and begin addressing remarks to me:

They were over budget by a million and a half after two weeks.

Is that so?

Helen Hayes never got through a second act without dropping half her lines.

I hadn’t realized that before.

You don’t know what hell is until you’ve been a woman directed by Jack Ford.

I’d never have guessed that.

Louis Calhern’s first wife was a great human being.

I’ll bet she must have been.

Then Mother would call on me to recite The Bishop Orders his Tomb or To a Skylark, depending on the company, and I would go off to bed to applause. One night Charles Laughton asked me would I agree to participate in an experiment with him. He had a theory about Shakespeare, that the rhythms and the music were so perfect and so evocative of sense, that even a child, ignorant of Elizabethan vocabulary, could convey the meaning. He asked me would I read aloud a passage of his choosing. I offered my cooperation, and Laughton called for the plays, which Mother brought, drawing attention to an inscription to her from S. N. Behrman. Laughton let the book fall open, and I found myself working through a speech of Mercurio’s, mouthing the syllables and imitating what I took to be good Shakespearean acting style. So attentive was my audience, that I became over-conscious of the sound of my voice, and since I could understand at most one word out of four, I began to fear that the experiment would fail on my account, bringing ridicule to Laughton and earning me his enmity. With a quick movement of my hips I caused the bottoms of my pajamas to fall to the floor, diverting attention from the text, affording the guests mirth, and gaining me a special good-night embrace from Mother and Dad.

These were the Malibu days, the Casa Fiesta days, when I ambled with the ungulates