One Man Alone

E ven if you wouldn’t recognize it by its name, you’ve probably heard the Irish ballad “Carrickfergus.” Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger covered it. So have Ed Sheeran and Bryan Ferry. Rufus Wainwright has an extant version, and his father Loudon Wainwright’s cover featured on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.

I’ve liked this version for quite some time.

It’s a song whose lyrics are evocative and mournful, full of longing and sodden self-pity. But the lyrics make no sense as a story — probably because the modern song was reconstructed by the Irish-American actor Peter O’Toole and the Irish poet and composer Brendan Behan. A combination of hazy memories and inventions. It was half-remembered. More likely, it was almost entirely misremembered.

The melody comes from an 18th-century song “Do Bhí Bean Uasal” (“There Was a Noblewoman”), which Wikipedia informs us was about a man who was cuckolded. It was a bawdy number. Others have suggested it is also sewn together with a Scottish song, “Over the Water.”

The narrator sings as if he needs to cross the sea to get back to Carrickfergus, a spot in beautiful North Antrim. It makes you think of the longing of an emigrant for home. But clearly the protagonist is still in Ireland — homeless, in fact. His image emerges over the last two verses. He is loner, maybe a one-time rake — “a handsome rover” — who sleeps in the fields at night and spends his days drunk, a man who expects to die soon. It’s incongruous, and because of that strangely haunting.

Last week, the local housing council workers in Sallynoggin in South Dublin entered what they believed was an abandoned residence. Last October, they had posted a notice that the tenancy was soon to be forfeit. They went in after neighboring residents complained of rats. And inside they found a hoarder’s pad. Among the artifacts discovered was a hand grenade that dated to the Anglo–Irish war one century ago. The council workers cleared out immediately, and the Army was called in to destroy the grenade. The councilors went in, and they discovered the remains of the tenant, Michael Whiston. He died over a year ago, during lockdown.

Local residents told the Irish Times that Whiston was a loner and didn’t mix with the community. One man called him “a very striking figure with a long white beard and long white hair.” The police are investigating the circumstances that led to a dead man being undiscovered for over a year, and others wonder why, if rent was not being paid, this hadn’t been discovered earlier.

It would be easy to speculate here that lockdown policies played a role. After all, the normal patterns of life were blown to flinders. The people for whom Whiston was a strange and enigmatic apparition in their lives would have expected to have fewer occasions to see him. Covid attacks the elderly, and he was over 70. He maybe kept an especially low profile. And even the council workers, living under government advice that explicitly discouraged all people from socially mixing with more than a few households, would have reason to hold back. Ah, sure, he might have gone off to live with younger family. He might have gone to the hospital and died.

Maybe. But that’s not adequate or fair either. Old men like this are often feared figures. Men who live without wife or children, who have lost or never had a vocation, are like men next to their own car crash. They stand next to the wreck of it all, looking disoriented, and we drive past. We might gawk for a moment, but most of us also fear to look too closely. We fear what it would be like to intervene. And we dread — consciously, or subconsciously — ever ending up in such circumstances ourselves. We hope that a subtle nod, mere recognition of the man, is a good deed done.

We expect, usually correctly, that men like these are socially burdensome. Socialization really is a skill that can atrophy over time. Some of us have dimly sensed this over the last two years. We expect that engaging men like these, even gently pulling on the thread of their lives, will leave them and ourselves completely entangled and lost in their mess.

I’ve seen men try to escape this fate through the bottle and an early death. I’ve seen other men suddenly and unexpectedly avoid this lonesomeness by transforming their lives — a whole conversion of lifestyle — and suddenly bloom. I’ve seen others just do something — anything to recreate a social role. One character I remember from my boyhood, a veteran, used to stand on the side of Route 6 in Carmel, N.Y., and just wave at the traffic. He somehow transformed his lonesomeness into something like universal admiration among locals. He was our mascot, our sentinel. He was our soldier, manning his post until the end.

And yet, all this week I can’t stop thinking about Michael Whiston. Or offering little prayers on his behalf. I suppose, I fear he is an icon of our age of atomization. I worry that stories like his are becoming more common, and will for a great long time. The stories of men like this will be half-remembered, mostly forgotten, yet rich with these incongruous details. The discovery of Whiston, moldering for a year, is far more terrifying than the ancient grenade he kept near to himself in life. Ecce homo.