Beauty and the Beast

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in verse--

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

-- William Butler Yeats,

“Easter 1916”

*

The details, even the fuzzy outlines of Dublin on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, may be as sketchy as dreams in the minds of most Americans. So what gives precision to history? How are we to remember an Easter 83 years distant? Is it enough to know, as Yeats did, that “they dreamed and are dead,” enough to name the dead, in prose or in verse, whether the list runs to four names, or 100,000, or 6 million? Can one explain the universe by naming the stars?

“There’s my little Henry up there. Look it,” says Melody Smart at the opening of Roddy Doyle’s latest novel, “A Star Called Henry.” She is pointing up to the heavens, to each of the stars named for her stillborn children. The year is 1906, and the boy at her side, following his mother’s finger, is one of the few survivors of the squalor and ignorance of early-century Dublin. He is a second Henry, a big, handsome, healthy 5-year-old, born “with enough meat on him to make triplets . . . a shocking substitute for the little Henry who’d been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself.”

There is a third Henry as well, Henry’s father, a one-legged giant of a man, who returns home occasionally to father other children on poor Melody when he isn’t guarding the door of Dublin’s premiere madame, Dolly Oblong, or bashing with his mahogany leg the skulls of the enemies of Dublin’s premiere gangster, Alfie Gandon.

Three years later, father Henry disappears. The son, now the compleat street urchin, armed with his father’s wooden prosthesis, marches up to the door of a schoolhouse with his younger brother Victor. “We’ve come for our education,” he says to the schoolmistress. Inclined to turn him away, Miss O’Shea is stopped by Henry’s terrible beauty.

“ ‘Two and two?’ she said.

“ ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Two and two what?’

“ ‘Cows,’ she said.

“ ‘Four,’ I said. . . .

“ ‘Twenty-seven and twenty-seven,’ she said.

“ ‘What?’

“ ‘Bottles.’

“ ‘What’s in them?’

“ ‘Porter.’

“ ‘Fifty-four.’

“I heard her elbow give up the fight, then felt her fingers on my shoulder.

“ ‘Are you a genius, maybe?’ she asked.”

When the abstract is given a name and becomes the particular, when two becomes two cows, yes, Henry is a genius. But despite the protestations of Miss O’Shea, Henry and Victor are chased away from the church school by the nuns, who are determined to place them in orphanages. And despite Henry’s attempts to protect him, Victor dies soon after of consumption. Death finally has a new name.

On his own, Henry is soon taken in by another schoolmaster, the Marxist leader James Connolly, and taught to read and write and even edit speeches and proclamations. And so it is that he finds himself, on Easter Monday 1916, occupying the General Post Office in the company of Yeats’ Connolly and Pearse, the leaders of the Volunteers and Citizen Army, fighting against the rule of the English. Six-foot-two, clad in bandoleer and rifle, the mahogany leg of his father in his holster, Henry is an improbable 14 years old, “probably the best-looking man in the G.P.O. but there was nothing beautiful about me. My eyes were astonishing, blue daggers that warned the world to keep its distance. I was one of the few real soldiers there; I had nothing to fear and nothing to go home to.”

*

Except his beloved Miss O’Shea, whom Henry finds serving tea to the fighters and itching to shoot a gun. There, in the heat of battle, grinding her bare-bottomed pupil into a stamp press deep in the innards of the G.P.O., Miss O’Shea gives Henry a very practical lesson beginning with one plus one. Yet war is a divider. And when Pearse finally surrenders to the outnumbered rebels, Henry has to use all the cunning of his father’s wisdom and all the ammunition of his own physical looks to survive.

He becomes one of the faceless rebels not executed by the British, a smudge mark on a photo of history, an elbow in a blurry picture of the future leader, Eamon de Valera. From this off-camera perspective, Henry rises in the ranks of the rebels, becoming Michael Collins’ favorite assassin. A name on a piece of paper is the only instruction Henry needs. And with the resurrected Bonny Miss O’Shea--known to her skeptical male comrades as “Our Lady of the Machine Gun”--at his side (Henry sticks his fingers in his ears as she takes her wedding vows in order to shut out the sound of her ineffable first name and keep her his schoolteacher forever), Henry becomes a regular Clyde Barrow to the republic. That is, until one day, just as it happened to his father before him, the piece of paper bears the name of a certain star up in the heavens. A star called Henry.

And perhaps this is Roddy Doyle’s greatest accomplishment--the naming of the dead. At a distance, the names of the dead can blur into a blank wall. Yet Doyle turns the lens and adjusts the focus as Henry slowly learns that, just as there’s no such thing as abstract math, there’s no such thing as abstract death. At the ripe old age of 20, Henry has killed his last man. He has a wife in jail and a daughter he’s held only once named Saoirse, Irish for freedom--Henry’s first abstraction.

Doyle is a writer with tremendous caches of imagination. If there is a feeling of disappointment that accompanies “A Star Called Henry,” it comes from the recognition that the ideas Doyle sets up with flair are detonated with predictability. Henry’s beloved Victor appears to him in dreams; the wooden leg of the father becomes Henry’s equalizer; a good revolutionary becomes a bad terrorist because he’s an anti-Semite; and the sex is always, always, phenomenal.

While this could be the stuff of a fine western, it is a bit too teary Irish, a bit too misty soft to match the brilliance of Doyle’s masterful “Paddy Clark, Ha, Ha, Ha.” Eighty years on, the world is too hard a place for the softer edges of terrorism. A terrible beauty has been born. And while we might revisit its birthplace, we can never go back to the womb. *