Maurice Walsh and The Quiet Man

Some stories are not written so much as listened for. They wait in a country's weather and a country's grievances until a man patient enough to hear them sits down at the right window, in the right month, with the right rent paid. He need not be a great writer. He needs only to know the tune, and to be willing to set down the words plainly while it plays.

THE EXCISE OFFICER AT HIS DESK

Maurice Walsh is fifty-four years old in the spring of 1933, and for thirty-two of those years he has been a servant of the Inland Revenue Excise: eighteen on the Highland circuit between Dufftown and Forres and Inverness, where he learned the smell of malted barley and married Caroline Begg of Banffshire in 1908, and another eleven, since the new Free State took him home, at the Customs House in Dublin. His writing is the work of evenings and holidays. The Key Above the Door in 1926 had been a Highland romance; While Rivers Run and The Small Dark Man had followed. He is not a literary man in the Dublin sense. He is a Kerryman from Ballydonoghue near Lisselton, son of John Walsh the farmer and Elizabeth Buckley, schooled at Listowel, and he writes the way an Excise officer gauges a cask: by the slow turn of the rod, by what the wood will yield, without hurry.

THE COTTAGE AT SPIDDAL

For six summers running he has taken the upstairs room of a rented cottage on the coast road at Spiddal, ten miles west of Galway city, where the Connemara Gaeltacht begins and the Atlantic light comes in long and clean off the bay. The Easter holiday is over; the family is downstairs; the desk is set against the window. From it he can see the white-washed gable of the next cottage, a strip of road, a wall of field-stone, and beyond all that the changing grey of the sea. He has come up here every morning since April with the same six thousand words to finish. The story is about a man named Shawn Kelvin who has been twenty years in the Pittsburgh steel-mills and comes home to a Connacht townland to claim the cottage that was his father's, and falls, against his own better sense, for the red-haired sister of the village blacksmith, Mary Kate Danaher. It ends, because in Connacht such stories must, with a fight on the road.

THE HINGE

It is somewhere after four on an afternoon in May. The pages are stacked. He reads the last line over and lets the pen rest. He could send it to one of the Dublin literary quarterlies, where it would be praised by three men he knows by sight and read by no one in Pittsburgh or Boston or Chicago. Or he could send it to George T. Bye at Curtis Brown in New York, and through Bye to the Saturday Evening Post, which had taken the serial cuttings of The Key Above the Door at fifteen hundred dollars a piece since 1929, and which prints two and a half million copies a week into the parlours of an Irish America five million strong. The Excise man in him does the arithmetic at the desk: a six-thousand-word story, properly placed, will pay two thousand American dollars in a Depression year, more than a year of the Custom House salary, enough to walk out of the gauging-shed for good. The novelist in him does a different sum. He thinks of his own cousins gone out from Listowel in the eighties, and of the Feeneys who left Spiddal itself for Maine, and of the way every household between here and Clifden has a photograph on the dresser of a brother in a hard hat in some American city. The story is not, he sees now, about a returning man. It is about the cottage the returning man comes back to, which is to say it is about every cottage on this road, with its half-door open and its absence sitting in the chair. He addresses the envelope to New York. He does not address it to Dublin. That is the whole of the decision, and it takes him less time than the boiling of a kettle.

THE SALE

The manuscript goes out by the late May post. Bye places it inside a fortnight. The Saturday Evening Post buys it for the cover date of the eleventh of February 1933, the trade convention by which an American weekly back-dates the issue to the season the editors wish to own. Walsh receives two thousand dollars on signature, and on the strength of it gives notice to the Excise. He has been thirty-two years a Crown and then a Free State servant. He goes home to Dublin a full-time writer.

THE DIRECTOR IN HOLLYWOOD

Three years later, in a bungalow office on the Republic lot in California, a man born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in 1894, the son of Spiddal emigrants from the parish next to Walsh's writing-window, reads the story and offers ten thousand dollars for the film rights. He signs his name now as John Ford. He cannot raise the money. He carries the rights in a drawer for sixteen years, through Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath and They Were Expendable and a war as a Navy commander filming under fire, and he asks every studio in turn for the Connacht picture, and every studio in turn turns him down. Republic at last lets him make it in 1951, on condition he first deliver them a cavalry Western to pay for it. He shoots the cavalry Western. Then he takes John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara and Victor McLaglen and Barry Fitzgerald to Cong in County Mayo, on the Galway-Mayo border, ten miles from Spiddal as the crow flies, and shoots Walsh's story in the rain and the green of an Irish summer. The picture wins the Academy Award for Best Director and the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 1953. Wayne walks Mary Kate across the field at Inisfree, and a hundred million Americans of Irish descent watch their grandparents' departed country re-enter the room on a Sunday afternoon television set, and decide that this is what it had looked like all along.

THE QUIET YEARS

Walsh in Dublin writes on. About fifteen further books between 1933 and 1961: Green Rushes, Blackcock's Feather, Trouble in the Glen, the short-story collections that the Irish country libraries stock without ceremony. He keeps the Kerry accent. He keeps the Excise officer's neatness of hand. The Ford picture money, when it comes, is a respectable sum and not a fortune, because he had sold the rights outright in 1936 before anyone in California knew what the story would become. He does not complain of this in print. He dies at his home in Dublin on the eighteenth of February 1964, in his eighty-fifth year, and is buried at Esker cemetery in Lucan.

RETURN

Some stories are not written so much as listened for, and the listener is paid a fair Excise officer's wage for the hearing of them. Cong in County Mayo, the village that stood in for Walsh's invented Inisfree, became after the 1965 opening of the Quiet Man Heritage Cottage the most-visited single site of the Irish western tourism map for the American diaspora, and remains so. Every September a fan convention walks the field where Wayne pulled O'Hara back by the wrist. Up the road at Spiddal, on the gable of the cottage where the story was actually written, there is a small plate. It reads, in Irish and in English, that Maurice Walsh wrote The Quiet Man in the upstairs room in the summer of 1933, and gives the dates of his life. The plate is the size of a hand. Most who pass it do not see it. The Atlantic light still comes in long and clean off the bay, and falls on the desk by the window where it always fell.