Walter Macken's Centenary (30 04 2015)

Wally’s mother was Agnes Brady from Ballygill near Ballinasloe. She was of farming stock there, and loved Walter, but she became a widow with three small children at the age of 28. Life was difficult. She had a small pension but it was not enough, so she kept lodgers. She always talked about the generosity of the neighbours and the wonderful community spirit in ‘the west’. Wally had two sisters, Birdie and Eileen who were two and three years older than him respectively. The children spent a lot of their summers on their relations farm in Ballygill which was a formative experience for them all, especially Wally. Much of the landscape described in ‘The Bogman’ is recognisable as the hinterland of the farm.

Wally was sent to the Presentation National School, a source of embarrassment to him as it was primarily a girl’s school. In spite of that he liked it and years later would write in their Centenary Magazine “Little babies meant to me; ink. This was my first contact with ink. We sat at a desk with a white ink-bottle stuffed in a hole, and one day, I drank the contents. This I remember brought me into the limelight... I often wonder if I got ink in my veins that day in middle babies and I am still trying to use it up. It is very difficult to give a logical explanation of why you drink otherwise”.

He started writing at about 8 years of age and at home he had a trunk full of manuscripts, mostly written on copybooks. He went to St. Mary’s for a couple of years until he fell out with one of the teachers there, so he moved to the Bish which he liked most of the time. He learned a lot there, made a lot of friends, joined the sea scouts and played on the school rugby team. He loved the Irish language and going for long walks and cycles. While he was still at school, Frank Dermody invited him to play a major part in a production of “Íosagáin” in the Taidhbhearc. He loved it and flourished there, becoming one of its most important actors. It allowed him to express himself in many different ways.

He left school with a good Leaving Cert and went to work in the Rates Office in Dominick Street. He found it boring, but his mother needed the money.

An Taidhbhearc were looking for new actors and actresses and this was mentioned to Tom Kenny, the editor of the Connacht Tribune. He passed the information on to his eldest daughter Peggy who was a very good journalist, and news editor of the Tribune. She went along to a rehearsal and met Wally for the first time. They fell in love that night, had an immediate rapport, and from then on were regarded as a unit. In fact they were in love till they died. Unfortunately, her father did not agree with her going out with a penniless potential actor, so they decided to elope. They got married in Fairview Church in Dublin, had a wedding breakfast with a few friends and got the boat to England.

Wally’s sisters were already in London, so they fixed him up with a job as an insurance agent for £7 a week. He did not like it, but needs must. He was starting to write. His son Wally Óg was born and after two years he was told the Taidhbhearc were looking for a new manager. He applied, got the job and moved his family back to Galway.

For the next few years, he devoted himself to that theatre. He directed the plays, produced them, acted in them, wrote some of them, built and painted the sets, did all the PR work, cycled around selling tickets to anyone he could. He slowly built up an audience. He was working with people like Siobhán McKenna, Seán McGlory, Johnny Horan, Cyril Mahony , Mairéad Concannon and others. He could be very bossy in rehearsal but that was because he was looking for high standards. After a few years, he began to write, initially plays in the Irish language. His first attempt in English was the play “Mungo’s Mansion” which was accepted by the Abbey Theatre.

His first exercise in fiction was “Quench the Moon” which was very successful. Friends now began to realise that the job he was doing in the Taidhbhearc was taking up too much of his time, stifling his creativity. They convinced him that he needed space to write, so he moved to Dublin and joined the Abbey Theatre Company there. He now had two sons, Ultan having been born a few years earlier, but between his family, rehearsing and performing on the stage, he still had more time to write and it was here he began to write “Rain on the Wind”.

He played the lead in an Abbey Production of a new play by M.J. Molloy called “The King of Friday’s Men”. It was a personal triumph for Wally and the play was hugely successful. An American Company was set up and they brought him to the U.S. to play the lead in a production there. They toured it around the east coast and it did very well until it got to Broadway, where, sadly it only lasted four or five nights. By now, “Rain on the Wind” was an award winning book and Wally was lionized by the media. He received a lot of offers, some substantial, to make films etc, but he turned them all down and returned to Dublin. One day he saw an advertisement for a house in Glann near Oughterard so he drove there, looked around the grounds and put a deposit on it. His publisher, MacMillan gave him an advance of £3,500 to buy it and it was here he would write most of his books. He loved this part of Conamara, it was inspirational and he was completely at peace there.

He had a terrific work ethic. He went to Mass every day, had his breakfast and then sat down to write. At least, sometimes he sat down. He did not like the physical discipline of writing and he often had to walk around the table to psyche himself up to actually sit down and start the typing. He would write for an hour or two and that was it. What he really loved was the plotting of the books, the pre-planning, the building up of characters. He often went on long walks or out fishing on his own or with his sons but all the time he was in the business of thinking. He rarely changed what he wrote. His wife Peggy had been a news editor and he would read to her what he had written that day. Occasionally, she would make minor changes, but most of the time, she did not dare touch it, she felt it had a sort of purity.

He was a great listener, and absorbed much of the local béaloideas and legends. He was terrific company, a gifted storyteller. His Taidhbhearc experiences in terms of acting, the disciplines of storytelling, the timing and delivery of stories etc. all stood to him. He had a beautiful baritone singing voice in spite of smoking all his life.

His Glann days were interrupted occasionally as he went away to act in a play or a film but these were brief forays. He spent several years researching and working on the most ambitious project of his career, an historical trilogy of books. He wanted to tell the story of Ireland from the perspective of the ordinary man. Nothing like this had ever been written before and his simple direct style obviously had great appeal as the books became enormously popular. They loved his style of writing in The New Yorker and published a number of his short stories. He wrote stories and articles for a number of other journals and papers as well. His books were published in translation in quite a few countries. He was writing, writing, writing. As already mentioned, he was a deeply religious man and so was very upset when three of his novels were banned as they were deemed to be obscene. The censors must have had to search very hard to find an obscenity in his work, but they did give him a certain notoriety as all the best writers in Ireland were banned at the time.

His Glann days were very productive for him, it was a place of great beauty and very inspirational, but it was a long way from Galway, and the constant driving in and out was beginning to take its toll, so he and Peggy decided to move closer to town. They found a site in Menlo and built there and eventually moved in there. Life became easier for them, more accessible. They could walk the prom and going to the cinema (which they loved) did not involve a 50 mile round trip.

In April, 1967, he did not feel very well. His doctor sent him into hospital but they could not find anything wrong with him. After a few days he went home. That night, he could not sleep so he got up and lay down on the sofa. At some point, Peggy heard a sound and went out to find him dead. He was 51 years old.

His funeral was enormous and his passing left a huge void. Tributes came in from all over the world but the loss was most keenly felt in Galway. He was a man with the common touch who was blessed with extraordinary communication skills. He has left us a rich legacy.

Photograph captions: 1. Walter Macken’s father, also called Walter 2. Walter leading the Bish drill team 3. 3. The Bish rugby team, 1931-32 Back row; Jimmy Coyne, Christy Denny, Bill Toner, Paddy ‘Sonny’ Hynes, Harry Flattery, Seán Ó’Neill, Ronnie Grealish, Charlie Rabbitte, Jack Deacy. Middle Row; Paddy Horan, Walter Macken, Donal Donovan, Danny (known as Dannyone) Lydon, Billy ‘Joxer ‘ Kelly. In front are Jimmy Hickey and Pat Mullin. 4. Walter Macken, second from left, in the Sea Scouts. 5. Walter with Siobhán McKenna in a Taidhbhearc production 6. Walter and Peggy

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