The Three A’s. That’s how I began my master classes in storytelling with John Jacob O’Neill: appetite, authority, address. Session one lasted from half past nine to eleven; the second from a quarter past eleven to one o’clock, when we broke for lunch. Our third began at two o’clock and ended at a quarter to four, and our fourth session began at four o’clock and ended at six; it usually consisted of me repeating all that he had told me that day, and asking related questions.
During that first week I asked him why he had made the last session so long, especially at a time of day when people fell asleep.
“That’s precisely why,” he said. “So that you’ll defeat the sleep demon.”
Before we got to language and delivery, we visited every corner of physical technique. He spoke about hand gestures, movement on the chair, leaning in different directions, eye contact, inflections, how to use a prop such as a glass with liquor in it or a pipe—in my case, he suggested a pen.
What clothes should a storyteller wear, in general? He had two ideas: either conform to an image people might have of what a storyteller should look like (as with my black coat, black suit, black tie, white shirt, and black boots) or go the exotic route and wear a coat of many colors, like a Gypsy.
Each had its advantages and drawbacks. My habitual garb made me look, he said, “not unlike an undertaker—but it won’t distract people.” Were I to wear, say, a coat like a wizard’s, all bright color and wild pattern, it would announce me, he said, as “exotic, and it might fascinate the people listening to you, but would they hear every word, or would they be too busy looking at your coat?”
He favored what he called “clothes with a strong identity.”
“Explain?”
“I dress like an Irishman. Or, to put it more directly, nobody is surprised at the clothes I wear, and yet they’re distinctive enough for me to be noticed. And taken seriously.”
These practical teachings took months. They included how to knock on a door, how to enter a house, how to greet the people: “As though you’re delighted to see them and as though you’re bringing them something special—which you are.”
He taught me how to charm a housewife who groaned at the thought of an extra mouth at the table and grimaced at the notion of her children being up till all hours. “Tell her,” he said, “that you heard of her kitchen’s great hospitality. She can’t go against that.”
If the storyteller knows the house has children, “wear a watch and chain across your vest. Finger the chain, and the child will surely ask you the time. Take out the watch, open it, and show it to the child, and tell the child a story about the watch.”
I asked him, “What story do you tell?”
“I might make one up. I might say to the child, ‘Until very recently, this watch was around the neck of a baboon.’ Always use a notable word to a child—like ‘baboon’ or ‘chimpanzee.’ So: ‘The creature took it off an explorer who was attacked by a lion in the jungle, but the lion couldn’t digest the watch and threw it up. Now, it so happened that the explorer’s brother went looking for him, and he saw the watch flashing and winking high in the trees above the jungle, and he lured down the baboon with bananas, and got back the watch, and that’s how he knew that his brother had died.’ ”
He asked me, “In the middle of a story, how do you retain the attention of your listeners? It might be late at night. The fire makes people sleepy—so what do you do?”
I shook my head, aware that I wasn’t expected to know.
“That’s when your technique comes most to help you,” he said. “You do things.”
For the next few minutes he showed me all kinds of small movements. He searched for matches; he mopped his brow with his pocket handkerchief; he crossed one foot over the other; he paused on an upward inflection, as though interrupting himself with his own sense of wonder at the tale he was telling. At one moment he looked away, to gaze
down into the fire and shake his head, as though he felt staggered by what he was about to tell. Next he clapped his hands hard together and exclaimed, “And do you know what?”
I hadn’t observed him using many of these stratagems when he was telling me stories, and I said so.
“But you never fell asleep,” he said. And chuckled.
Every night, by the fire after dinner, four nights a week (after Friday’s final session, I drove back to my house outside Dublin), he told me a full story. Nothing was required of me but to listen.
He took me all over the world in those tales. I learned about a boy in Cuba who slew a blood-sucking creature that had been terrorizing a village. He told me a story about a dance marathon in Russia, where the prettiest girl in the village made her many young suitors dance all day and all night, and she would marry the last man standing. Who was blind.
From Italy he had a tale of a man who made a bargain with a witch and tried to renege on it. The island of Ireland has thirty-two counties, and for eight weeks he told me a story from each county—in alphabetical order.
He told me the shortest story in the world: “That evening, the last creature left on earth saw the sun going down in the east.” The longest, he said, “would take seven years, seven months, seven weeks, seven days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. And note,” he continued, “that we use seven devices for measuring time—years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.”
Before he considered me ready for the exalted level of telling him a tale, he and I analyzed a number of legends. He showed me how to lead with a strong character. “Or, better still,” he said, “with a weak character who grows strong, because the best legends are those where we learn how to overcome what besets us.”
Conflict, he said, lay at the core of every story, because we face pressure all day, every day.
“Walking against the wind—that’s the least of it. Getting up, going to bed, preparing food, eating food—we futile creatures must struggle all the time. Nothing that we need comes to us; we must reach for everything.”
He boiled down “the things we call stories” into three simple components:
“Somebody does something for some reason. Or,” he said, “Who does what and why? After that, language is the toolbox. In there, you should find shiny, beautifully polished and honed tools, with sharp edges or hammerheads or needle points, and with those tools you will fashion your tale.
“But, as with all tools, you have to learn how to respect them, and how to use them with accuracy and elegance. I mean to say, you never see a master carpenter take his toolbox, open the lid, and toss the whole thing up in the air. How would he ever get his table made? And he certainly wouldn’t get the lovely marquetry inlay done, and the dovetailing and detailing.
“And at the end of the day, after using his tools on the job to the best of his ability, the carpenter will be tired—and so he should be, because he has made an effort to work hard and with grace, to create something that is poised and admirable, intended to bring pleasure to people.”
A great leap forward came when he sent me out of the house to the top of the lane and told me to walk back as though approaching the house for the first time, with the intention of telling stories by the fire. We opened the door to heavy rain. He didn’t say, “Wait till the weather clears”; he said, “Well, you’ll be out in all weathers, and you’re used to it anyway.”
My heart racing, I waited, then walked back down the lane as, so to speak, an actor. I knocked on the door as directed: three firm, spaced knocks. He took his time answering, and I said, “God save all in this good house.”
“And yourself,” he answered.
“Do you have room in your mind for a tale of life itself, a tale of wonder, wisdom, and delight?”
When he’d taught me that line I’d said to myself,
I wouldn’t have been able to resist that if I’d heard it at my door
.
After what he called “some furnishing and burnishing,” we moved on to embrace content. This training, naturally, took the longest time of all. During our tuition segments, he trained me in four stories. First he told me the entire tale, and then I had to repeat it to him. Then he went back over it piecemeal, and I repeated segments.
He criticized my pace—“too fast, too anxious.” And my smile—“too frequent, too false.” Of my language he said, “Not rich enough, not
strong enough.” And on we went, until I told those four stories in their entirety to him at night, in the time between dinner and bedtime, the time he usually told me tales I hadn’t heard.
Monday night, the story about the chariot maker and the boy who could speak to horses: no comment on my telling. Tuesday night, the woman who tamed a whale and rode on its back down the coast to see her mother: no comment. On Wednesday night I told the old Irish legend of the children of Lir, condemned to live as swans in the cold places of the earth: he listened as keenly as a child and made no comment.
On Thursday night, I finished telling, as he had taught me, the story of the man who made a wooden horse and then breathed life into it, and went on to create from the same timbers a woman, whom he then married. As I spoke the words, “That is my story, and now that it has left my mind and gone to live in yours, another story will soon take its place,” John Jacob rose from his seat and stood looking into the fire. After a pause, he spoke:
“It occurs to me to say, ‘You’ll do well.’ But you work best when praised. Therefore I’ll not stint on what I think and feel. You’ve taken on this training with vigor and conscience, and you’ll be hailed as having donned the mantle of the great tradition. Wherever you go in the world you will be respected and welcomed, as long as you continue to honor the story in the way I heard you do all this week.”
Children, I didn’t let him see the tears in my eyes. That night, I think, counts as the only night in which I didn’t sleep. His praise worked some balm into me—not enough, I know, to erase that awful stain, but it helped, and I lay in my bed, not hating myself as much.
A month later, John Jacob Farrell O’Neill made what he called his “final, final” appearances as a traveling
seanchai
. And I embarked upon a life that had once been his. We’d agreed that watching him work would count as my last tuition. After that, we would have what he called “an
important conversation.” I was to tell him my own philosophy of storytelling—which he expected me to have worked out by then. That had to happen, he said, before I’d be ready to go out on my own.
In our planning we’d agreed not to be foolish. Yes, we’d approach every door on foot as though we had been walking all day, but we would travel everywhere by car. And we would park just out of sight of each house to preserve the illusion.
As a second concession, to his age and the times we lived in, we would make it clear that we didn’t expect to stay in the houses we visited.
“I’m too old to share a bed with another man,” he said, “and you’re too young,” and we laughed. “However,” he added, “if the lady of the house is free to make amorous overtures, I’ll compete with you for her affections.”
To which I said, and I knew it to be true, “I’m afraid I wouldn’t stand a chance in that contest.”
I think we were only half-joking.
It crossed my mind at that moment to ask him about the prosperous-looking blond lady I’d seen driving away from his lane that bell-clear morning. I’d never seen her since then—but I had taken care not to arrive early on a Monday again. True, I did sneak around the place once or twice on Mondays afterward, but I saw nothing evidential. Unless you count a new box of Black Magic chocolates sitting on the table in the scullery, near the sink.
He could, though, have bought them himself—he claimed a “weakness” for them. “Must be the name,” he said. “I’d eat anything with the word ‘magic’ in it.”
On the night before our road trip, I arrived at dusk. A car drove away mere seconds before I reached the top of the lane; I saw its red taillight as it headed for the mountain road. It occurred to me to follow it—and then, firm as a foot, I shut down that idea. It had nothing to do with me, no matter who it was.
At the house it took John Jacob half a second to open the door—and then he stepped back, startled.
“Oh, Ben. I thought—” He stopped and led the way in as normal.
He thought that the person who had just left had forgotten something and had come back for it. That’s what he thought
.
He recovered fast. “I have all the maps ready,” he said.
“And I have a question for you.”
“Fire ahead.”
I said, “You have to answer it.”
He looked at me as if to penetrate my frontal lobes with his eyes. “This is serious. I’m listening.”
I said, “You can probably guess what I’m about to ask—but I’ll ask it anyway. Is it possible that I will tell a story somewhere, in some house, by some fireside, some night—and then find that it, or a version of it, comes true?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“What is that? A phenomenon of some kind?”
“Every storyteller worth his salt will tell you that. And I suppose, yes, it is a kind of phenomenon. I have a different explanation for it. Mythology is the emotional history of a country, the spiritual record. And when you’re in that kind of mystical territory, anything can happen. And usually does.”
I said, “What does that do to the storyteller?”
He smiled. “Just the kind of astute question I’d expect from you.” He made me wait—and then said, very quietly, “It heals.”
From there we turned to the maps. We had spent a great deal of time working out where we would go, and for how long in each place, and how we should schedule the trip day by day. Pursuing his system at its best, we intended to start in the north of Donegal, on the Inishowen Peninsula, right over at the border, and work our way down the coast to Sligo. If we got fine weather, we’d have a glorious time.
I knew by his face, though, that some new and important matter had seized him.
“Here’s the map,” he said. “We’re going somewhere else.”
“Where?”
We bent over the table together. He pointed to a village I knew well—Templederg, fifty miles to the west, out on the coast. “There. And only there.”