“September 4, 1916.”
“Ballade Autumnal” is in Villon’s perfect manner, and his replies to Kipling and Watson will be remembered in Ireland for all time. In a volume entitled Poems and Parodies, his verses have been collected and published.
Style in writing was a thing he regarded as of paramount importance. Though a prolific writer for newspapers, he was no believer in the theory of dashing off an article. On the contrary, he maintained that one of the drawbacks incidental to anything hastily written is that it is bound to be too serious. To write well, you must labour infinitely, otherwise one’s work is sure to bear traces of what he called the “heavy paw.” In the Nationist, when the slipshod work of some popular writer was being reviewed he observed, “At least we are stylists.”
In the same degree as he loved the expert, he abhorred the quack, the charlatan, the pseudo-writer of prose or poetry. I remember one night a popular novelist and writer of magazine stories, who had achieved fame and money without achieving literature, was telling with great unction of his success. He told how his recent book had been translated not only into French, Italian, Spanish, but even into a Dutch dialect. My husband, flicking the ash from a cigarette, said in a very urbane voice: “That is very interesting. I dare say then it will soon be translated into English.”
In speaking, too, while his notes were scanty, in fact mere headings, he always thought out beforehand both the matter and form. As he put it, he favoured “carefully prepared impromptus.”
Friends will remember him at his best as a conversationalist. As a raconteur he was inimitable, and, as a critic says, “It was not so much the point of his tale that counted. The divagations from the text in which he loved to indulge were the delight of his auditors.” “What Doctor Johnson said of Burke,” observes another critic, “was essentially true of Kettle, ‘that you could not have stood under an archway in his company to escape a passing shower without realising that he was a great man.’”
He had the literary man’s constitutional distaste for writing or answering letters. A friend once said chaffingly to him that he might write “The Life and Letters of T. M. Kettle.” “Well,” retorted Tom, “you may write my life, but there won’t be any letters, for I never write any.” He was also unpunctual in keeping appointments, and finding the telephone very useful, he said it should be called not “telephone,” but “tell-a-fib,” as that was its chief function.
He was intensely Catholic and always flaunted the banner of his religion. “Religion,” he writes in this volume, “is one of the ideal forces that make men good citizens and gallant soldiers.” And again, “If soldiers will not fight on an empty stomach, still less will they fight on an empty soul.” Perhaps because he loved his faith, so he could afford to take it humorously at times. I remember once his throwing off in an epigram the difference between the Catholic and Protestant religions. “The Catholics take their beliefs table d’hôte,” he said, “and the Protestants theirs à la carte.” What chiefly appealed to him in Catholicity was its mystery and its gospel of mercy. If he often quoted Heine’s well-known semi-cynical “Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier,” it was because he felt an amazed gratitude that a God should choose such an original profession. He greatly liked the society of Irish priests. He used to say they were gentlemen first, and priests after. They, too, loved him, and took his gentle chaff as it was meant. I remember how a priest friend of his enjoyed a sermon for golfers which Tom composed for him. Needless to say it was never preached. In it golfers were enjoined to “get out of the bunker of mortal sin with the niblick of Confession.” During the Dublin strike an anti-cleric was railing against the priests, who had intervened to prevent the deportation of the children. Tom completely won him over with the original argument “that the priests were acting as members of a spiritual trade union.” Writing of the great Catholic poet, Francis Thompson, he puts in a lyric plea for his religion: “The superiority of the Catholic poet is that he reinforces the natural will by waters falling an infinite height from the infinite ocean of spirit. He has two worlds against one. If we place our Fortunate Islands solely within the walls of space and time, they will dissolve into a mocking dream; for there will always be pain that no wisdom can assuage. They must lie on the edge of the horizon with the glimmer of a strange sea about their shores and their mountain peaks hidden among the clouds.” He had a wonderful spiritual humility. What he found admirable in Russian literature was “an immense and desolating sob of humility and self-reproach.” He abjured the self-righteous who, he used to say, went round as if they were “live monuments erected by God in honour of the Ten Commandments.” He was, indeed, over generous in the praise of qualities in others which he had superlatively himself. Anyone with a gift, a “plus” man at golf, a Feis Gold Medallist, an expert gardener—just the distinguishing cachet of excellence won his admiration. Witness how he lauds the valour of his Dublin Fusiliers, and yet his courage was no newly acquired virtue. I remember several years ago he went to a political meeting at Newcastle West. A faction party took possession of the platform. The intending speakers were for abandoning the meeting, but Tom declined to give in without at least a fight, and led the attack on the platform. After a nasty struggle they captured their objective. Mr. Gwynn, who was one of the speakers, was so impressed with my husband’s daring that he wrote me his admiration, saying that he led the attack “with nothing but an umbrella and a University degree.” His moral courage, too, never failed. When occasion demanded it, he could always be counted on to say “the dire full-throated thing.”
For the memory of Parnell he had a deep reverence. This is his vision of him—
“A flaming coal