The following series consists of a number of excerpts from the previously unpublished novels of Belfast author Gerard Keenan, long time pseudonymous contributor to The Honest Ulsterman. This material is reproduced here by generous permission of Gerard’s son John and is edited and introduced by Dr James Gallacher of the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool.

This second extract from the unpublished work of writer Gerard Keenan is taken from a late novel written around the turn of the 21st Century. In a continuation of the stylistic form developed in his earlier work, the piece is written as a fictionalised biography concerning Keenan in and around the time of his move from Belfast (codenamed once again Farset) to London in the mid-1950s. The relationships and characters recalled in the extract detail once more a sprawling literary network that stretched from Belfast to London and connected a colourful array of seemingly disparate artistic figures, central to which lay influential Belfast writer, editor and BBC radio producer John Boyd, lightly disguised in the piece as ‘Jim Pullman’. The description of Boyd and his relationship with Keenan goes some way to revealing the nature of life as lived by Keenan and his friends in the Northern Irish capital in the years following the end of the Second World War. Boyd, of an older and more established literary generation, was seemingly intent on playing mentor to Keenan and, as such, offering a guided induction to a seam of the Belfast cityscape often overlooked in contemporary and subsequent consciousness, one wherein the city sustained a moderate but consistent literary and artistic fraternity via associations at foreign cinema screenings, art galleries and literary talks. The affectionate irreverence with which Keenan describes the dynamic between him and Boyd belies the significance of the relationship; in spite of the ostensible derision with which the younger man considers the strength of Irish short story writing, his first published work was indeed a short story published by Boyd in his capacity as editor of the important literary periodical Lagan: A Miscellany of Ulster Writing in 1946. Keenan’s inclusion in the journal as a teenager, alongside the heavyweight Northern trio of John Hewitt, W.R Rodgers, and Louis MacNeice is testament to Boyd’s faith in the young writer’s potential and also stands as an interesting counterpoint to the commonly held critical evaluation of Lagan as a mouthpiece for an exclusory strand of Ulster Regionalism. Keenan, a Catholic from New Lodge makes for a perhaps surprising contributor to the magazine, but one that is testament to the forward-thinking pluralism and tolerance for which Boyd was renowned.

Aside from Boyd, the figure most extensively examined in this piece is Mayo-born and Bolton-raised playwright and author Bill Naughton, who is cast here as ‘Freddy Mills’. Naughton, most famous for his 1963 play Alfie that was subsequently adapted for screen starring Michael Caine, was a long-time correspondent and erstwhile friend of Keenan’s who acted as a sort of gatekeeper to certain sections of London literary society. Via dint of his periodically strained relationship with Naughton, Keenan casts a deeply critical and at times overtly caustic appraisal over the often compromised and ignoble realities of professional literary life. The often deeply condemnatory recollections of Naughton focus predominantly on his willingness to utilise literature as a means of making money, particularly through his regular short-story writing for the mid-brow London periodical Lilliput, fictionalised here as London About Town; a cardinal sin to Keenan’s artistic creed. Additionally, his criticism of Naughton’s ghost-writing for famous film star and founder of the Mermaid Theatre, Bernard Miles (present as Basil Onions) throws into a pointed relief the evident and lifelong seriousness with which Keenan approached the arts.

Aside from his rather puritanical perspective on cultural and literary matters, this extract highlights once again Keenan’s presence among several significant British and Irish literary circles and, given his acute capacity for cogent while entertaining recollections of their interactions, gives a brighter glare to his relative invisibility within 20th Century literary history. It is hoped once more that his publication here will help to raise awareness not only of Keenan’s personal literary standing, but also the significance of many of the literary connections to which he was party either side of the Irish Sea.

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I knew the name Freddy Mills first of all as a name about which I teased a friend in Farset, Jim Pullman, a BBC talks producer who was a heck of a lot more sincere than most professionals of his ilk. We bumped into each other at film society screenings of foreign movies, art gallery events, and at literary talks by visiting speakers. Pullman was a generation older than Jo and I were and liked to act the role of social-anthropologist using us as informants on what our generation was up to, even counting of our gods and goddesses on his fingers: ‘so (one finger), you’re listening to Britten; (second finger) Jo’s translating ‘La Putain Respectueuse’ for the Mercury Theatre; (third finger) you’re reading Montherlant. Now, what about the Irish? Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien, Beckett. Good. Do you read much philosophy? What to you think of Ayer – a radio interviewer structuring his interrogation.

Being a journalist, he had met everyone (briefly) and, being a journalist, he accepted the current hierarchy of celebrities as a given. My game was to shy a ball at each of his coconuts and try to dislodge it. The one coconut Pullman would not abandon to my jibes was H.L ‘Freddy’ Mills, a short-story writer who appeared here and there in the usual art-prose venues of the time. The well-constructed short story was a bete-noire of mine: the better it looked the worse I found it. Ireland was full of its practitioners, turning out countless cute, neat, postage-stamp-sized masterpieces: later practitioners would turn to poetry.

     ‘There are no short stories in life, Jim’ I used to lecture him. ‘Nothing starts, nothing finishes in life. It is a continuum. You can have short fictions, but not this famous class art of the short-story form by Frank O’Faolain and Sean O’Bloody Connor! Your friend Mills is crowing on the same dunghill, except his dunghill isn’t in Cork or Dublin, it’s in a working-class suburb of Manchester, with meticulous attention paid, of course, to niceties of local idiom and diet, cow ‘eel and bacon butties!’

     ‘You’d like Freddy if you knew him,’ Pullman would say patiently. ‘Freddy’s a great guy’, and when I ran into him the day before Jo and I were to fly to London for our first holiday visit there, he gave us Freddy’s phone number and urged us to go and see him.

     If my life was to become entangled with Freddy Mills’ life, it was entirely my own fault and I accepted the consequences of my actions. During our holiday, the first day we met Freddy in London, we had meant only to stay to lunch, but the conversation went so well that we didn’t leave his flat in Eccleston Square until midnight, with Freddy embracing me and urging:

‘come and live in this town Joe. You’re wasting your time in Farset. Come and live here, mate, and you’ll make a fortune. If I could talk like you I’d be living in Park Lane. I’d be fucking rich!’

I hated talk. If I talked all night to a first-time acquaintance it was as a fisherman trailing bait. Talking to Freddy Mills had been like playing a dummy keyboard: no return, no resonance. I basely put aside my reservations about him because he was an open door to London and over the next couple of years I corresponded regularly with him, ending with Freddy generously offering to put me up for a week or two while I looked for a place and a job. If my life was entangled with Freddy Mills’ life, it was indeed entirely my own fault: I wanted to live in London, where the books lived.

My fortnight living with Freddy, although an experience of terrifying novelty for me, a first time away from home, proved no torture. I played possum, I blended with my background, I sang for my supper, sometimes literally. I discreetly flattered. Like so many ‘English’, Freddy was some sort of Irish; that is he had been born in a village in County Mayo in Ireland’s remote west, but his family had moved to Lancashire when he was tiny and he had not experience of Ireland beyond family reminiscence and Catholic education, primary education only. Coming from Farset, an industrial city in the British part of Ireland, I knew about as much of Ireland’s rural west as I did the black hills of Dakota. And, as for its brogues and regional locutions, at least such as Freddy’s mother and father were supposed to have used, I found it hard to believe that Freddy hadn’t collected them from one of the corny plays about the Oirish from the Abbey Theatre repertoire or even from the arch-begetter of that suite of pap, John Millington Synge.

But, Irish Catholic was the identity Freddy appeared to think we shared. I didn’t mind. I even joined him in bawling out hymns from the children’s Masses of our boyhood- I only knew the first few lines, as this repetitive kind of worship had always bored me, I would ball ‘To Jesus’ Heart all burning’, then mumble and mime the rest.

Freddy lived with his young wife, whom he had acquired since we had lunched with him two years earlier, in two rooms on the ground floor of a massive house in the stucco-faced west terrace of Eccleston Square, bathroom and W.C not in the flat and not exclusive to it, but on a landing up one flight of stairs. To say ‘two rooms’ could be to mislead, for, as Jo used to point out, the cubic footage of either of these two great rooms in a former mansion was at least treble the cubic footage of all the rooms put together of the parlour house in Somme Rd in Farset where she had grown up. When I stayed with Freddy I slept in the ‘guest room’, a portable bed behind a screen in the read one of his two rooms, where a fine kitchen was installed.

Carmel, Freddy’s wife, cooked breakfast for Freddy and me and then went out to work. Carmel worked in a travel agency. She was younger than I was, maybe twenty; slim, blonde and beautiful. She was an Irish girl, from the County Limerick with a rich southern accent – when one ever heard her accent for, in company anyway, she never spoke a word. She was the most silent person I had ever met, although there was no hint of sulky silence, or the neurotic silence of repression: her smile could light up the room, and her movements were as confident and graceful as an athlete’s. While I lived at Eccleston Square she watched over me with the kindest of attention and put me entirely at my ease. Perhaps, she had been the only girl in a family of boys on her farm in Limerick. While it was true that Freddy affected a tough guy persona from time to time, he never appeared to bully Carmel. He didn’t have to: she did everything for him without being asked. At night, after supper, Freddy fancied a long walk and talk with me along the Thames as far as Chelsea Bridge and back. The first night, when we had eaten, I began clearing the table to help Carmel with the dishes, as I would with Jo.

     ‘Leave it, Carmel likes to do that,’ said Freddy, almost shortly. I wasn’t to set a bad example, maybe. Each evening, when we returned from our walk and sat discussing books or whatever, Carmel was a quiet presence in a corner with her sewing or her knitting or she would be at a side table working at something or other to do with Chick’s Travel Agency. Did her job pay for the rent on their flat in Eccleston Square? Questions like that in my mind were not vulgar curiosity: I wanted to know how Freddy managed to live in London because I wanted to know how I was going to manage to live in London.

Freddy Mills was a burly man I his forties, a burly body topped by a large head, a large pink baldhead, tanned in the summertime, with bushy grey hair around the perimeter of his tonsure and a tight grey moustache. His startlingly baby-blue eyes in his round rosy face gave him an appearance of great innocence, like Father Christmas, an illusion of innocence that, I suspected, he had played on all his life. His burly frame was well-clad in a tailor-made tweed suit, inside the jacket a ‘hare’ pocket, i.e. poacher’s pocket, where he kept a notebook for jotting down ideas for short stories as he ambled around London. With Freddy’s checked woollen shirt and red woollen tie, his dress was, in fact, a uniform, the uniform of the leftist London intellectual, models to be found if required in the art photographs of contributors in John Lehmann’s ‘Penguin’s New Writing’. Although a great sneerer at uniforms, I had a quiet hypocritical peep in the stores at the price of Viyella shirts, tailored tweed suits and red woollen ties and found that for all their emblematic leftiness they were much, much too expensive for the likes of this member of the proletariat.

The short stories nourished by the note book in his hare pocket were another source of Freddy’s finances: he published a story a month in London About Town a monthly magazine modelled (at a great distance) on America’s New Yorker, i.e. a rather wee nucleus of near-art writing, plus first-rate cartooning, embossed in a massive superstructure of posh advertising matter. The stories had to be short and sweet. Freddy drew them mostly from his childhood experiences in Stonybrow, a small town or suburb (I gathered it was a mill town) on the outskirts of Manchester.

As a source of income the writings were supported or protected or insured against risk by Freddy’s wisely sticking close to the fiction editor of London About Town, Tabby Tabernacle, or at least that was how I read it. Freddy met Tabernacle every weekday morning, when they would stroll up to the Indian tea-place in Haymarket for a pot of tea. At Freddy’s invitation I joined them on their walk one morning, though not in their pot of Assam. I was very conscious that Tabernacle was paymaster to Freddy, so I was on my best behaviour, the open-mouthed Irish boy in the big city. I was required to laugh a lot at what passed for wit. Literary London, according to Tabernacle’s account, revolved around a series of crooked deals in which he came out best; he cheated publishers, cheated agents, cheated editors, all of whom had been doing their level best to cheat him. What was being talked about was money, which was not my subject. I slipped and slithered out of accompanying them again, although fearful of offending Freddy; but Freddy was learning that I had a cantankerous, opinionated side and he was not offended, but indeed, relieved that I wasn’t there to walk my hobnailed boots all over his fragile business arrangement with Tabby.

Over weeks, or maybe months, additional to Carmel’s wages and Tabernacle’s monthly story deal, I began to feel out a third source of income for Freddy: his work for Basil Onions. From the cautious, almost unwilling way Freddy leached out smidgeons of information about his relations with Onions I guessed that this was the important one. I didn’t fish for detail, but I made it easy for Freddy to talk about it or not talk about it, which meant he talked about it.

I knew Basil Onions and I think that this worried Freddy in some obscure way. I knew him well. I’d known him for years inasmuch as I knew a lot about his career. He was a film-actor and stage-actor who worked also in the wider field of stage-production and film-direction. Everything he did had a touch of class to it. I had seen him on the stage back in Farset. A big London company had brought a very distinguished production of The Taming of the Shrew to the Farset Opera House – a rarity of a production for it opened with the Induction, almost always omitted in performance; the clowning scene where Christopher Sly, the village drunk, is found on his back, snoring, passed out in the inn, is dressed up by the local squire in finery and duped into believing when he wakened that he is a rich man who has been ill for years under the illusion that he is the village drunk. To celebrate his recovery The Shrew is performed for his entertainment by a company of travelling players and, from the darkness of the wings, Sly comments a couple of times on the play-within-the-play. Onions acted Sly with superb comic art: also, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he was the one who had conceived the idea of including the Induction in the first place, for he was that style of theatre person, intelligent, intellectual, never satisfied with simply repeating what had been done last year or the year before. For this reason, he was not what you could call a film star, but he brought distinction to any film part he played: one had to sit up and listen when Onions was on screen.

From reading the theatre and film pages of the Sunday papers over the years I had learned that Onions was also a producer of opera, opera with the biggest international names in the cast. I could not fit Freddy Mills into this milieu. I was puzzled as to where the hell Freddy Mills and Basil Onions could find common ground. Neither was remotely homosexual, something, which brought many disparate couples together in 1950s London. Freddy had no conceivable foothold that I could see in this glamourous world of opera, film, or Shakespearean theatre. He had no interest in the arts as a way of life, as a discipline, as a study or spiritual exercise. For Freddy, the arts were a way of making money, an easier way than most. I don’t know why I had always thought that writers would also be readers: this was rarely so. If they read at all, it was only to study the market.

But, in my analysis of the Mills-Onions relationship I was overlooking one important factor; cash. As is so often the way, Basil Onions’ best work produced the worst pay; the more rarefied the artwork, the more rarefied the income it generated. Basil needed regular work. Basil needed regular money. Freddy Mills wasn’t a thoroughbred race horse in Onions’ stable, he was a trencherman Clydesdale out there in the fields hauling the plough.

I was alone with Freddy one morning in his flat in Eccleston Square. It was months after I had settled in London. Jo must have been at school and Carmel was at her travel agency, so Freddy and I were just two guys chatting, a good time for confidences. I could feel it coming, whatever it was, for Freddy’s voice had gone soft, a mysterious smile lurked about his lips; he was going to open his heart to me.

     ‘I’m doing some things for old Basil.’ He said.
     ‘Good old Basil. I really like that guy.’ I said, meaning ‘go ahead. I’m totally sympathetic’
     ‘I do him these pieces for his dinners,’ Freddy said.
     ‘His dinners?’ I said, momentarily unsaddled, completely at sea.
     ‘I write these after-dinner speeches for him,’ Freddy said.
     ‘Oh, I see,’ I said, still at a loss. ‘God it can’t be easy, Freddy.’
     ‘It’s a big money earner for old Basil,’ Freddy said. He’s booked in all over the country. As far north as Edinburgh. It makes him thousands. Lord Mayors’, High Sheriffs’, Chief Constables.’ Then Masonics and Rotary clubs, of course. Old Basil’s the guest of honour. Then before the bloody Royal toast Basil rises and the bloody Toastmaster in his red waistcoat and begs silence for our honours guest, you know the sort of thing.’
     ‘I know,’ I said. I did not.
     ‘Most of these are do’s for men only, of course. So it has to be a bit spicy,’ Freddy continued. ‘Basil does his rural bit, his yokel with the accent, fond of nooky, down to earth, dead course. By this stage all the nobs are full of brandy and puffing heir cigars. Basil tells me he lays it on with a trowel and they lap it up. I’ll show you some of the material old Baz brings me to dig stuff up, all fucking Elizabethan dirty joke books!’

Freddy when to his fine chest of drawers, a massive piece of polished wood. From the bottom drawer he produced two wonderful old books, like large format ledgers: they, they looked like some clandestine Faustian spell books but were, in fact, merely jest-books from the early 1600s.

     ‘These are fucking valuable,’ Freddy said. ‘Basil has them on loan from a collector pal of his. My job is to root out all ye olde jests and shape them into rural yokelese for his character routines. Look. Look at all those fucking f’s for s’s! I never know whether I’m reading about a sucking pig or a fucking pig. And they are pretty explicit, I can tell you. They are fucking and sucking on every fucking and sucking page, ye olde English bloody pornography. Basil makes me put in stuff that makes even me blush. “this is the genuine heart of Old England, Freddy,” he tells me almost in bloody tears. “It’s our heritage, Freddy. Don’t knock it. This is the voice of the people of England, it’s sacred.” Old basil doesn’t have talk crap sometimes.’

     So I feigned a fawning interest over the bibliophile’s prized possessions, but later in the day with Jo, I simply had to make my truer feelings known:

     ‘what a degrading way to earn money. An actor of Onions’ talents and intelligence sitting with rich morons in dinner-jackets. Not just to deliver Freddy’s jokes, note, like reading a speech like a stand-up comic, there’s nothing wrong with that, but to sit gassing with them throughout their entire umpteen courses, like a courtesan in Maxim’s in Paris or a gigolo from an escort agency.’