Ring of Truth – Frank McNally on Graham Greene and the Bells of Shandon

Midway through Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt (1969), an amoral tale of sex, violence, and international smuggling, there is an unlikely cameo appearance by the Bells of Shandon.

The novel follows the adventures of Henry Pulling, a middle-aged former bank manager from the London suburb of Southwood, after he meets his long-lost 75-year-old Aunt Augusta at his mother’s funeral and is persuaded to join her on a trip to Brighton.

It gradually emerges that the respectable old dear he took her for is in fact a former prostitute and current person of interest to Interpol, whose ideas of morality threaten to overthrow his buttoned-up banker’s world view.

And it’s by way of illuminating Pulling’s staid character that Greene has him fantasise one day about the alternative life he might have led as a minor, middlebrow poet:

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“I would have been happy,” he admits, “to be recognised, if at all, as an English Mahony, and to have celebrated Southwood as he celebrated Shandon.”

The Mahony in question was Francis Sylvester of that surname, also known as “Father Prout”, a 19th-century humourist from Cork. His work long featured in a popular and much reprinted anthology, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, a copy of which Pulling takes down from his shelf to read again the lines:

“There is a bell in Moscow,/While on tower and kiosk O!/In Santa Sophia/The Turkman gets;/And loud in air/Calls men to prayer/From the tapering summit/Of tall minarets./Such empty phantom/I freely grant them;/But there is an anthem/More dear to me,–/’Tis the bells of Shandon,/That sound so grand on/The pleasant waters/Of the River Lee.”

The verse serves a second purpose by chiming (pardon the pun) with the increasingly complicated travels of Henry and his aunt, which in time take them to Paris, Istanbul, and Paraguay, where Henry’s steep education curve eventually includes learning that his mother was not his mother, and that his aunt is not his aunt.

Cork does not feature on their itinerary. But aside from supplying a character detail, the throwaway reference to Shandon seems to have been a vestige of Greene’s life-long interest in Ireland, begun during the original Troubles.

He first visited this country in 1923, as an 18-year-old Oxford history student, just after the end of the Civil War. Sixty years later, he recalled the trip in an interview with the historian and diplomat, Pierre Joannon:

“I went with a cousin and we walked from Dublin to Waterford. The impression remains of broken bridges all the way along the route. It was a week after de Valera had issued his order to dump arms. We didn’t find any enmity except in one town where people threw a few stones and in a pub where the owner pretended that there was no food, although we could notice people eating eggs and bacon. That was all.”

The young Greene romanticised Ireland’s struggle for independence, then and later. On a subsequent visit, in the late 1940s to Achill Island, he sought out Ernie O’Malley, whom he found “enchanting” but guarded:

“I remember one day in Achill, I asked him at what time high tide was. He hesitated a long time, a look of caution came into his eyes and his attitude became typical of the Old IRA man determined not to give any information to a possible enemy. ‘Well Graham, that depends,’ he said.”

Greene’s Irish sympathies are reflected elsewhere in his fiction, notably in the late novel Dr Fischer in Geneva (1980), whose hero contemplates suicide by starvation, before worrying it might take too long: “I remembered the mayor of Cork who had survived for more than 50 days, wasn’t it?” (It was 74).

A century after Greene first visited Ireland, the other Cork institution he referenced in his novels has of late been celebrating a major milestone, sharing as it does both happy and unfortunate anniversaries with the Civil War.

Work on St Anne’s, as the famous church in Shandon is officially known, began in 1722. But partly because of the Civil War that broke out during its bicentenary year, it is unknown when exactly the building was finished.

There is no foundation stone, or any plaque commemorating the consecration. And the parish records were lost, along with so many other Irish archives, in the destruction of the Four Courts in 1922.

It is hoped, however, that there may still be evidence somewhere of when the church opened. Hence, inaugurating the tercentenary last year, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork appealed for public help. In a title almost worthy of Greene, the parish research project, now ongoing, is called “The Shandon Mystery”.