Castles & Ruins: Unraveling Family Mysteries and Literary Legacy in the Irish Countryside

Castles & Ruins

Unraveling Family Mysteries &

Literary Legacy in the Irish Countryside

Rue Matthiessen

Castles & Ruins:

Unraveling Family Mysteries & Literary Legacy in the Irish Countryside

Copyright 2024 by Rue Matthiessen

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

For permissions, contact: [email protected]

Cover design by Blair Seagram and Kevin Breen

Book design by Kevin Breen

Softcover ISBN: 978-1-957607-25-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-957607-27-6

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

Manufactured in the United States of America

Published by Latah Books

www.latahbooks.com

This book is dedicated to the strong and generous women who each in their own way saw the empty spaces that were left, and helped me to drag a self out of the ashes. I am forever indebted and grateful to them.

In order of appearance:

Dorothy Sherry, Maria Matthiessen, and Merete Galesi

Contents

Prologue: Annaghkeen

Smash the Pane

Real Life

Tinkers

The Ancients

Fallen Gods

Ghost House Walk

LSD and Zen

The Girl in the Raincoat

Hell’s Bells

Hoko Debby

Old Timers

The Storybook

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Prologue: Annaghkeen

At the age of seven in the summer of 1965, I lived on an island in Galway, Ireland with my mother Deborah Love, father Peter Matthiessen, and my twelve-year-old stepbrother Luke from my father’s first marriage. The rare opportunity to rent such a place came to us through my father’s profession as a writer, and by extension his circle of artistic and literary friends. Writer Don Braider and his wife Carol were friends of my father’s first wife Patsy Southgate, daughter of Richard Southgate, Chief of Protocol for the Roosevelt White House. The Braiders had lived in Ireland for two years and had enthusiastically connected him with the O’Connells, owners of the island and house.

Across the waterway from our island in Ireland that summer was Annaghkeen Castle, erected by the de Burgh family in the 1300s. For our purposes, it lent a magical air to all that it surveyed, including our island with its own pine wood, a monkey puzzle tree, and an ancient cairn. A retaining wall ringed the side facing the castle. From the edge of it, the lake waters were gray-brown and spooky, even on sunny days. The water in Lough Corrib was good enough to drink, and we did. My brother and I swam every day, diving from the dock or the retaining wall.

That summer and always, aside from his travels for research, my father never had to be any particular place to do his job. It was easy to pack up for a month, for three months, for six months, sometimes with family in tow but more often on his own, to gather research and write. To some, this might seem a great freedom, and in many ways it was. But one idiosyncrasy of not having to be tied to anyplace can also extend to anyone, and that became pervasive throughout the culture of our family in its various forms over the following years. Through a myriad of manifestations, my father always had a stunning ability to move on, sometimes shucking earlier associations like fresh snow from his shoulders.

My first taste of this shapeshifting, always-forward flow, this ability to land somewhere and re-create ourselves, or at least try to, came that summer of 1965. As I was only seven, I couldn’t have known that there was another aspect of the trip—my parents had planned it as an effort to save their marriage. The tense atmosphere between them was a constant weather pattern, each season recognizable—gathering storm clouds a cue to ramp up defenses, and the good parts very good, more so for their impermanence—while signaling another cue to let some air from the balloon and fly a little closer to earth for fear of crashing.

At home in New York, my father’s earlier books, written in the mid-to-late-fifties, weren’t big sellers. But in the summer of 1965, At Play in the Fields of the Lord was going to press, and it would be his breakout book. There were parties with stars of the art and literary world dropping by our remodeled home regularly—writer and bon vivant George Plimpton and his wife Freddie, writer William Styron and his wife Rose, writer John P. Marquand Jr., and Joe Fox, my father’s editor at Random House, to name a few.

From a young age, it was impossible for me to miss that there was something different about my father. He drew people to him, whether he wanted them around or not. He often wanted to be alone, working. Yet somehow his considerable self-containment leant him tremendous personal power. He was absolutely a star. He was charismatic, he was glamorous, and so was the world that he lived in. He had a gaze that was memorable, and sometimes frightening. It bore right through you. Was it depth of vision? All seeing? Was it wisdom? Was it something bottomless in him? Some great void?

As my father’s career took hold, he needed the household to run well; he might’ve been surprised to discover that his intellectual and ambitious second wife was not domestic in any way. Instead, my mother wanted to practice Japanese tea ceremony in a special room she had made up with rice-paper screens and tatami mats, or walk on the beach at the foot of our road, or sit at her own desk writing down all that she thought and wondered about. It was a good thing she did not defer her hopes. The journal she kept in Ireland would become her first and last book. It was called Annaghkeen, after the castle. Over the course of my life, I would read it many, many times.

In their early years, it was she who went first to Alan Watts lectures, did yoga, and practiced Zen. I remember her getting out her yoga book (with photographs of an emaciated swami in what looked like a diaper) and practicing yoga on the bathroom floor. Her friends thought she’d gone mad. She didn’t care. When we traveled to Italy in 1968 and lived in a castle with expat friends from New York, my parents and their friends took a pure LSD that came in blue liquid form because LSD was purported to be like twenty years of psychoanalysis in a vial.

By that time, partly due to my father’s constant affairs, their marriage was in deep trouble. My mother treated the evidence of his dalliances in the same radical spirit—she dropped me off at a babysitter and went to the city to meet up with her admirers. There were many to choose from. LSD became another drastic remedy, pushed to the limit in sessions in New York City and Italy. She would pile on the dosage if she thought there was anything she might learn about how to fix herself, her husband, or her third marriage.

For me, as a child at Annaghkeen, the mood in our little house on the island was still insulated from all of that, if only by virtue of the earliness of things, and me being very young, and the many miles between us and home in New York. Even if I had been able to see into the future, I could not have understood the enormity of the changes that were there, just waiting for us to step into them.

On the island, my father strained toward his work, usually tucked away somewhere outside where he wouldn’t be bothered—a yellow legal pad balanced on his knee, and bird and wildlife reference guides in a neat pile beside him. Meanwhile, my mother was most content while reading Yeats and difficult fiction like Finnegans Wake and thinking about big questions, often staring off across the water. Sometimes, we’d sneak off together to Ross Errilly, a nearby ruin of a Franciscan convent and church. There, while picking around worn stones with her walking stick, she heard whispered answers of a sort that she wrote about in Annaghkeen.

Other days, my father and Luke would get the motorboat going and take us fishing or to the Ower House hotel a few miles down the shore for dinner. We went to Inchagoill Island to see the Lugnaedon Stone, which had an early Christian cross. We visited Cong Abbey, eight hundred years old, and Inishmaine Abbey in County Mayo from about the same period. Having abandoned the Episcopal Church of their youths, my mother and father were still deeply contemplative by nature. So we went to these ancient abbeys, churches, and monasteries again and again. I felt their wistfulness in these places. There was a sense of being almost finished, of coming apart from each other and from us, and coming back together, possibly, at some future point. What this point was—where it was—I had no idea.

Ireland was their attempt to stop time. Perhaps in the silence, the reasoning that drew my parents to a life of letters—and each other—would find new vigor. Away from the whirl and the demands of running a big house, my mother would have a chance to study and write and find her own voice, my father to fish and fossil hunt, bird watch, and unwind. Galway was ancient and fascinatingly undisturbed, yet neither of them could have been prepared for what they found or did not find when all the distractions were removed.

Upon our return to the States in the fall of 1965, my mother went to work on developing her journals, and mine, into Annaghkeen. When her book first came out, I was eleven. I remember the stacks of signed copies on the living room table, waiting to be given out to family and friends. The dust jacket was her black and white photo of the castle under a tall, cloud-pocked sky. The picture wrapped around to the back to show the bungalow and a flurry of pines looking on. For me, the philosophical parts were too dense, so I skipped them. I concentrated instead on the parts that I had written, that were taken from a journal she’d encouraged me to keep that summer. Reading my own seven-year-old ruminations about fairies and my pet snail Wilbert, complete with misspelled words, was thrilling. I wasn’t interested in the rest. When I was older and she was gone, I’d read the book again, devouring paragraphs, looking for clues in what she had said or done that might be illuminating. My own memory became garlanded with hers, creating more of a mystery about what that time had been.

After Ireland, she and my father hung on, the drama subsiding for brief sunny periods or whenever they had a stretch of time apart. At Play in the Fields of the Lord was published, and the movie rights were sold. He bought an otter-skin coat for her and a gray wool coat with a nutria collar for himself. They jokingly called these the success coats. In 1967, he published The Shorebirds of North America, and in 1969, Sal Si Puedes.

In April 1970, Annaghkeeen was published. About five months later, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I was grateful to have Annaghkeen. People often said what a lucky thing it was to have a book that could be a touchstone throughout the years, like having a visit with her. By the time I was married, years had gone by without reading it. I had been too busy.

Paradoxically, the memory of my mother became more vivid as my son Emmett grew older, especially as he approached the age I was during our Annaghkeen summer. Echoes of her, which had always been present, grew louder. The worn copy of Annaghkeen in the bookcase spoke to me every time my eye rested on it. I began to wonder about Annaghkeen Castle, the actual place. Having survived at least a millennium, surely it must still be there. In all those years in between, I hadn’t been back to Ireland, not even to bounce through on the way to somewhere else. So I began to think about going back and seeing if I could find it again. I talked to my husband Steve. Though his forebears were Irish, he had never been there, so he liked the idea. It looked as though we would have the time to go in the summer. We’d have to rent out our house near the sea on Long Island, and there would be a lot of work to do.

For awhile, at night after Emmett was in bed, I pored over maps and books about Ireland from the library and from Steve’s dad’s bookshelves. In those pages, I found many Irish antiquities but never a mention of Annaghkeen Castle. I had imprecise coordinates from my mother’s book amounting to a few paragraphs, and that was all. It was exciting to look through all of this stuff and think about the trip. Unlike the few other trips we had taken—to the Caribbean or New Hampshire in the summer—it helped me to think of the whole thing as a treasure hunt in a country unfamiliar to Steve and unfamiliar to me since I was young. I was brimming with anticipation but also with an underlying sneaky feeling, like continuing to listen in on a phone line after the other person believes that you have hung up. Ireland was my parents’ story, not mine. I was just a kid. What would I find? I was a little afraid and intensely curious at the same time.

We would travel hard, never staying anywhere for long. We’d include a few of the more famous destinations my mother had written about—Ross Errilly Friary and Cong—but also leave a certain amount up to chance because it would be more interesting that way. The treasure, I told myself, was to lay eyes again on the castle and the little house across the waterway where we had lived, and to think about those years and learn something about this place my parents had chosen for us that summer. Emmett could learn about the country of his forebears, and so could we. Keep it simple, I said, flicking through my pages of plans, having no idea what was to come.

Smash the Pane

While it was important to remove ourselves from the place we were, we could really be going anywhere. Yet Ireland drew us, for it is not yet of the world, but belongs still to the earth, far more ancient and primitive and passionate, and there men listen to the strange voices that they hear, and are respectful.

(Italicized excerpts, including this one, are from Deborah Love’s Annaghkeen, except where otherwise noted.)

I told Steve that this was most likely the land of tea, not coffee. Steve, a person who needs strong coffee like a car needs gas, was pale. In the arrivals hall at Shannon, we found a Starbucks knockoff that looked good to me, though he shook his head. Steve has a canny sense about these things and often has hunches about restaurants that turn out to be true. It was our only choice, however. A woman at the counter with the alertness of a college professor took our order: a double espresso for Steve, a small coffee for me, and a hot chocolate for Emmett.

I was dazzled to be breathing Irish air again, and tired, as were we all. The woman served us, for the price of Starbucks, a weak brew not much better than instant. The coffee didn’t matter, I will never forget her—the first Irish person I had spoken to in forty-one years. It was as if she knew the whole story. Or maybe, while working in an airport, with people tumbling off planes, she felt that in some way she might represent the entire nation. Her smooth face was kind and patient, and her green smock matched the hue of the big green sign above. She brought extra milk for Emmett’s hot chocolate because it was too hot and was so polite and warm that tears came to my eyes. We sat in a circle around a plastic table, gathering up pieces of ourselves and looking around. Six-year-old Emmett drank sloppily, stunned by the experience of hurtling through the sky all night to alight four thousand miles away from home.

Ireland was, as advertised, a riot of greens. As we drove south toward the Dingle Peninsula, the fields were lumpy with grass so green it looked lit from within. There were smells of what I guessed to be peat fires, and cows, which I remembered. The fields stretched for miles left and right of the highway, divided by stone walls or dense bouquets of trees with a rustling softness, the sight of which was also intensely familiar. Behind and all around, the land undulated in varying verdant hues, with low stone walls that sank and rose along its contours. The air was moist and soft, a cut-glass blue with white clouds chugging across the sky. As we whizzed along, we glimpsed more cows: black-and-white date stamps in a green blur. There were also a fair number of palm trees, making odd, aggressive claims upon the sky. They were incongruous to my eye; after all, we weren’t in the Caribbean. These unremembered palm trees were a reminder of how long it had really been.

Our destination was Annascaul, named for the River of the Shadow that runs near it, about halfway out to the western edge of the peninsula. At Shannon Airport, we were actually fifty-six miles west of Lough Corrib and where Annaghkeen Castle was supposed to be, but our plan was to head west instead of east. Staying three or four nights in each town, we would more or less hug the southwest coast before traveling to Dublin, where we would spend some time, then heading straight across the middle of the country to Galway.

Ireland’s southwest has three main peninsulas: Dingle, Iveragh, and Beara. They cut deep into the lower left flank of the country, comprising an extra one thousand miles of coastline where there would be only about sixty if the land were straight. These rocky promontories and bouldery beaches clamor into the Atlantic, whereas the more linear side of Ireland is on the Irish Sea. We chose Dingle, the topmost peninsula, because Beara was too far away and we had heard that Iveragh, home to the famous Ring of Kerry, was overrun with tour buses in the summer. But we were to find that Ireland almost always feels like a bigger country than it is, and underpopulated.

In Annascaul, it was hard to know that we were even in a town. There were about twelve structures, many of them pubs, and the main road seemed to have no tributary. We asked two ladies in skirts and sensible shoes for directions to our B and B, the Four Winds. Oh yes, Kathleen O’Conner, they said, as if resuming a conversation with us from which they had only just been diverted. They directed us a half mile down the road, to a first right onto the Old Dingle Road, which we were told went up the hill. There we’d find it.

The Four Winds, encircled by an asphalt driveway and more distantly the Slieve Mish Mountains, had a real feeling of remoteness—just what I had longed for after hectic weeks of preparation. The bungalow-style house was surrounded by green fields for miles in every direction. A car came down the narrow road once every hour or so, brushing by the overgrown bramble and broom. Kathleen O’Conner, the proprietress, knew from my earlier emails that we were from the U.S. She showed us a choice of two rooms next to each other on the parking lot, one an odd affair with a small bedroom, a full kitchen, and—up a spiral staircase—a twin bed on a glorified shelf that was an attempt at a loft. Another one had two double beds and a pull-out armchair. Picturing Emmett falling out of the loft, we chose the latter. Aside from two young backpackers staying on the other side of us, we were the only patrons.

Our body clocks, set for five hours earlier, lurched us forward. We put our bags down, weeks of preparation coming to a close. The smells, the faint sounds, the textures were exquisite, if only for the absence of anything pressing to do. The beds were decent, though the comforters had seen better days. We sprawled luxuriously, listening to the quiet. Emmett marveled at our modest bathroom, where everything was familiar to him but different—an oddly shaped, low toilet, a tiny sink and rattletrap medicine cabinet, and a square, deep tub with a seat in it, as if to accommodate a very old person. True to form, Steve had the TV working first thing. We got twelve channels through a set of rabbit ears sticking out of a brown plastic box on top of the set. Looking earnestly but perplexedly at the screen, Emmett watched Dora the Explorer, a Latina cartoon character from L.A. who teaches Spanish. However, this Dora the Explorer was speaking Gaelic where the English would have been, punctuated by the Spanish: Azure! Rosa! Verde! Azure! Rosa! Verde! To my ear, the Gaelic was unmusical and leaden. It was the first time that I can remember having heard it. I thought that despite the Irish facility with words, Gaelic, or Irish, wasn’t a pretty language. Then I wondered if it wasn’t just the dubbed-in voice and my uninitiated ear.

My attention drifted to the folder of poems I had brought. There were three about me—unborn, at one, and at two and three years of age. Unwittingly, my existence had opened a door