Late one late August afternoon some 20 years ago, I was taken for drinks to a two- or three-centuries-old stone manor house in the Midlands of the Republic of Ireland. The owner was a latter-middle-aged member of the caste still referred to, albeit ironically, as "the Ascendancy" - though it has been descending in numbers, influence and prosperity since Irish independence was achieved more than four score years ago. More familiarly called the Anglo-Irish, they were professionals, merchants and landowners of principally English origin when Britannia ruled Eire. Most of their families had come to Ireland well before Europeans settled the North American continent.
I was shown around the house - oil portraits and bits of real armor - by its owner. He took me finally into his library, each of us with a glass in hand. Standing under a painting of a storied steeplechasing thoroughbred, looking out on grazing horses in pastureland below the house, he turned to me and spoke in a voice that seemed completely casual. "Thank God, for the cubbing," he said. "About this time every year, I know if it weren't for the cubbing, I'd just put the Purdey to my head."
Cubbing commences in September, before cold weather and real foxhunting begin. Members of hunts chase young wild foxes on horseback, led by baying hounds - getting riders, horses, packs and prey fit for the season. Purdey is the legendarily finest of English shotgun makers.
What startled my American spirit was not that a man of obvious prosperity, comfort and apparent good health should contemplate suicide. It was, rather, that he should so fluently talk about it to an almost stranger, putting the concept of self-destruction on a plane with, say, planting a new rose bed or replacing the roof of the house.
He was quintessentially Anglo-Irish.
No one I know of who is writing today gets what the Anglo-Irish are all about better than does Annabel Davis-Goff. Her latest book, This Cold Country (Harcourt, 368 pages, $25), drives that conviction home.
It begins in Wales in the first months of World War II. Britain stands alone against Germany, which dominated all of Continental Europe. Every able-bodied British man and many, many women were uniformed. The heroine, a 20-year-old Church of England curate's daughter, Daisy Creed, has joined a sort of national farming corps and is a hand on a small working farm.
Two cousins of the farm owner's wife, Army officers, come to visit. Daisy is attracted to both, as apparently they are to her. Ultimately, a third of the way through the book, she marries one of them, Patrick Nugent, three days before he goes off to battle and eventually to prison camp.
Patrick is the senior male of an Anglo-Irish family - his sister and brother and grandmother live in Dunmaine, a large, 190-year-old house in County Waterford. Daisy moves there immediately after the wedding.
Patrick's parents were long since dead. The ancient grandmother, Maud, whose father had been British Ambassador to Czarist Russia, "had gone to bed at the outbreak of war and had no intention of getting up again until peace was proclaimed." Arriving among in-laws she has not met, without Patrick and without much instruction, Daisy faces a dreadful tangle of jealousies, secrets, dependencies, debts, mismanagement and indifference to all of that.
Everything is perceived, though in the third person, through the eyes of Daisy, who is a powerfully engaging combination of naivete, practicality and simple worldliness. The narrative leaves a great deal unspoken. Motives and manners often are left to explain themselves, sustaining a tension that drives the book - and sets up some small melodramas.
There is a very 19th-century British feel about the novel, in texture and attention to domestic detail. Daisy gradually comprehends the situation and something of the other players' personal positions, without assimilating. She realistically accepts that it is up to her to run the house and the family's finances. She would get no help:
"She did not consider Mickey [Patrick's brother], or even Corisande [the sister], hostile, but that did not prevent them from being dangerous to her. She could feel apathy, like the damp draft at her ankles or the Virginia creeper on the front of the house, ready to subsume her, freeze her, bind her, deaden her, and render her passive."
She fights back, slowly, gently.
Gradually, she prevails.
Finally, the book is about survival. It is a growing-up story, a tale of a lone young woman coming alive and gaining something like wisdom. She fights under burdens, difficulties and emotional deprivations that would break most people Daisy's age - not quite 23 at the book's end. But Davis-Goff makes her compellingly believable.
It is a tour de force of narrative detachment and involvement, a deft, subtle, caring and honest novel that pursues and presents a vision of truths within a tiny tribal culture. It is humane and artistically accomplished.
Davis-Goff has a remarkable capacity to relate, and bring alive, the routines of simple domesticity. She deftly weaves into the action little lessons in history - often the same events seen through the contrasting prisms of Roman Catholic, Gaelic Irish perceptions and those of the Protestant Anglo-Irish. (The Republic of Ireland remained neutral in WWII, and many Irish, mainly for so hating the English, were enthusiasts for Hitler's cause.)
This makes the novel a valuable text on the utter obsession with history that permeates life on that island even today.
In September 1989, I wrote about Davis-Goff's memoir, Walled Gardens: Scenes From an Anglo-Irish Childhood (Knopf) for the New York Times Book Review. After finishing This Cold Country, I went back to my piece and was pleased enough to commit the unspeakable immodesty of quoting myself: "It is a premature epitaph for a distinct and powerful tribal subculture that though now long without nourishment refuses to die. The book's joys, lean and simple, are the wordless chant of survival."
On and on they live. Thanks to Annabel Davis-Goff's clarity, courage and caring, they seem increasingly immortal - if no easier to love.