THE NEWS that my name appeared in Stubbs last week will come as a pleasant surprise to my enemies. A green satisfaction will fill their souls.
The Plain People of Ireland: Your enemies? What enemies?
Myself: I can mention no names. Be assured, however, that there are hordes of them in every walk of life. They ask nothing better than to do me an ill turn. They are working and scheming against me night and day. They pursue me with infinite venom and cunning. Slander and calumny, whispers in the ear. The unseen hand, backstairs influence, I believe our friend was up in court last week, but had it kept out of the papers. Is that so? On what charge? O you’ll laugh when you hear. Listen (whisper-whisper-whisper). WHAT! Are you serious? O it’s a true bill, had it from the Guard. And another thing, I believe the unfortunate wife gets a hammering every night. In at ten past ten full of prunes and porter. Where’s the cigarette-butt I left on the mantelpiece this morning? You don’t know? Don’t you? Well, take that!
Any mud is good enough so long as it sticks. Back-slandering and poison-pen letters. Get him one way if you can’t get him another. False friends everywhere. The small corrosive word half-uttered in the right place. He’s no good I’m telling you, he’s no good. No matter where I go my traducers have been there before me. Sorry, sir, you can’t come in here, sir. Them’s my orders, sir, Sorry, sir.
No explanation. If our friend puts his nose in tonight, slam the door in his face. Never mind, do as you’re told. No, don’t say I said so. Just slam the door. And see that you make no mistake about it. We don’t want that particular customer in here.
Even my young sons, my innocent little lads of twelve. Hello, sonny, I believe your poor father is locked up again. He’s not? He’s laid up? In bed? Ah, the poor man. Well, he didn’t sound very ill at three in the morning last Saturday night when he nearly pulled my door down and smashed four bottles on the step. The poor man is laid up, is he? Dear, dear, dear.
Of course, if they think that this campaign will deflect me from my course or abate by one tittle my advocacy of the far-reaching reforms to which I have dedicated my life, they are vastly mistaken.
Further comment is superfluous. The whole thing would be humorous were it not so tragic.
THE MYLES na gCopaleen Banking Corporation is experimenting with a new kind of cheque book. The whole thing would be laughable were it not so tragic. Each cheque looks perfectly ordinary, but when it is drawn, cashed and returned to the Bank, strange things happen behind closed doors. The Bank’s officials get to work on it, and if you could only see them at it, you would observe that each cheque is in reality two cheques cleverly stuck together and separated by a sheet of fine carbon. Thus, when you draw a cheque in favour of ‘Self’ for ten pounds, you get that much money, but the Bank gets two cheques for ten pounds. Furthermore, since the genuine endorsement is on the back of the second cheque and the drawer’s genuine hand-writing on the face of the first, both can readily be established, in a court of law or elsewhere, to be genuine documents, notwithstanding any minor pretexts for suspicion; it is a simple matter to forge a colourable endorsement on the back of the ‘genuine’ top cheque.
All this means, of course, that our clients are unwittingly spending their substance twice as fast as they think they are and qualifying speedily for a permanent abode in that populous thoroughfare, Queer St. And the Bank gets more and more dough.
I WILL TELL you a good one. It was tried on us recently at the Myles na gCopaleen Central Banking Corporation (all stand and uncover, please), and we were not the slowest to learn our lesson and take the recipe for our very own. It is a new dodge and one that will save you hundreds of pounds a year if it is used intelligently. Cross that out and say thousands. It is a secret weapon that will close the doors of our fancy competitors in College Green if you see fit to use it against them. (And why shouldn’t you, pray, what about the £31 10. 0, is that forgotten already?)
It is a new sort of ink. It looks no different from the sort you use every day. It is blue-black, bright, thin, clean, and runs like sweet fancy through your fountain pen. It has this great virtue, though. Six hours after you write something with it, the writing has completely disappeared. The paper is again restored to its virgin white. Not a speck of ‘ink’ remains. Just think about that for a minute.
You walk into your bank, take out your cheque-book and special pen and write out a ‘Pay Self £20’. You get your money, three fives and five singles and thanks very much, it’s a bit cold today but sure what can you expect in the month of March? Out you go. That evening the poor banker is puzzled to find a completely blank cheque among the bundle marked ‘paid’.
In the meantime you have not been idle. The fifty publicans to whom you are all too well known are called upon. Tobacconists, grocers, bookies and solicitors are whipped in. Just a little bit short, old man, could you let me have a fiver, will I make it out to yourself or the firm? Thanks very much. The following morning a hundred dupes are holding a clean blank cheque between finger and thumb, gazing at it with a wild surmise. By the way, you owe me £35, I’ve got your I.O.U. here. Have you? Show me it. That’s not an I.O.U. man, where’s my signature? Don’t try to pull any quick ones like that, old boy, I owe you nothing.
Write to me at this office for a small bottle of the stuff. Twenty-five shillings a time and no cheques taken in payment.
Sure I knew them well, man, used to live beyond in Dartry, the eldest girl was very delicate and the son turned out to be a very bad bit of work, sold all the furniture to buy drink when the dacent ould couple were having their three days in the Isle of Man and then skipped it to America, a wild no-good waster with a whiskey nose on him before he was in long trousers, he was never seen or heard of from that good day to this. A fierce disappointment to his father, ould Shaun Mohican, the dacentest man that ever stood in shoe-leather, an out and out Parnellite that follyed the Chief to the very end, never wavered like so manny more. The Mohicans were always there when Ireland called, I knew the uncle that was in the Connaught Rangers, in a day’s walk you wouldn’t meet a dacenter man than the Star Mohican, the family came from Meath originally and were very big people down there in the days gone by. Ah yes. Of course you’ll find one bad egg in the biggest basket. It takes all classes to make a world. Who? Me? Oh, another bottle of stout, I suppose.
WILL OLD Ireland survive? Not unless we work. We will survive if we deserve survival. Our destiny is in our own hands. Quisque est faber fortunae suae. We must pull together, sink our differences and behave with dignity and decorum. And above all, work. Work for Ireland. How queer that sounds. Not die, mind you. Work. Work for the old land. And at evening time, when reclining at our frugal fireside, saturated by the noble tiredness that is conferred by honest toil, in the left hand let there be no alien printed trash but the first book of O’Growney. There, then, is an ideal for you, something that you can do for Ireland. ‘I will let no evening pass without an hour at O’Growney.’ The old tongue. The old tongue that was spoken by our forefathers. Learning Irish and all working together—for Ireland. Let us do that and we will surely survive. Erin go bragh! Unfurl the old flag, three crowns on a blue field, the old flag of Erin. Our hearts are sound and our arms are strong. And what is our watchword? ‘Work.’ Let our watchword henceforth be that small word of four letters—w-o-r-k. WORK!
Next speech, next speech, please. Clapping. Old slow senile chairman. An hour standing up and another hour sitting down again. That cold whipping wind, you could get your death here, I was lost without that glass of malt, it’s always safer to have something warm under the belt when you’re above on the platform. Thin sullen crowd. Here only because there’s no pictures on Sunday. Next speech.
Yields to no man in his respect for last speaker. While the integrity of his outlook, his fine national record, the lucidity of his thought and his ability to marshal facts must needs command respect, nevertheless, ventures with all due humility, to voice some small doubts as to the ultimate expediency of many of his more radical proposals. Turn to question of Irish language. Always made it a point to keep an open mind. Not out of place to remark spoke it at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular. (Cheers.) But cultural movements dwarfed by present world events. Considered opinion that we are witnessing titanic struggle between forces of good and evil, the end of which no man can foresee and few could be so foolhardy as to predict. Young men, aye, and young women leaving the country in ever-increasing numbers, drain on our national resources. Behoves us to move with caution. Something must be done; words not enough; promises not enough. Country calls for action on part of Government. Only most drastic curtailment essential services, elimination unnecessary luxuries, cutting our organisation to bone, reduce overheads, stringent regulations, mobilise country’s resources, paramount importance of agricultural industry, community must stand shoulder to shoulder in hour of peril.
Next speech. Hurry please. Get this thing over. A drunk on our left trying to heckle. A rossiner wouldn’t be bad, have a double one after this. Next please.
Much pleasure rise speak today this distinguished gathering; particularly on same platform last speaker. Last time we spoke together great Longford Rally 1829; doubtless he’s forgotten. We’ve gone our different ways since then. Suppose no two men in this country more representative divergent poles political thought. Not what came here to say. Came say few words present crisis dark clouds lowering over fair face this country poverty unemployment transport problems turf hunger; country never greater danger. But spirit Irish people will prevail as ever, come to top. Only solution to problems before us is serious interest revival tongue our fathers spoke. Great revival work must go on. National heritage, nothing worth having left if not saved, receding rapidly in west. Save ere it is too late, only badge of true nationhood.
(Loud mad frenzied cheering.)
OUR AIM, by the way, is to give complete satisfaction. If this column is not in good condition when you receive it, return it to this office and your money will be refunded. In addition, you will receive six stouts in a handsome presentation cooper. When the column is written, it weighs exactly 0.03 grammes. Due to heat, evaporation or damp, the contents may become impaired or discoloured. In case of complaint, return it to this office with the rest of the newspaper and we will gladly replace it, or, at your option, return your money in full. Our aim is to make every customer a friend for life. We wish to give you complete satisfaction. We are your obsequious handwashing servants. We are very meek and humble. One frown from you and we feel that we have made a mess of our whole lives.
As the man said.
Recently, in mixed company, when boasts and brags of every kind were flying in and out through the hot murk of words, I ventured to make the claim (not without some show of humility and modesty) that I was the greatest living swine. Instantly sharp cries of dissent rang out on every side. How could I say such a thing, I was asked, when we have so-and-so and so-and-so in the country? The names mentioned were those of public and semi-public personalities that you know and that I know. What an exquisite pleasure it would be to print them here! But look, draw up your own list. Spend half-an-hour pondering our unique national assortment of cods and humbugs. Indeed, there is one so obvious that his name will leap to everybody’s mind—none other than—
The Editor: Hey, stop! Have you gone off your head?
Myself: I was only going to give one name. Just a small one. One that you know and that I know. Sure what harm would that be? Everybody knows it. It would only mean £800 and costs. And think of the reputation we would win for outspokenness, courage, fearlessness, honesty, and so on. ‘The Paper That Cannot Be Gagged.’ Indeed, damages might only be a nominal farthing. It was held by Pallas C.B. that—
The Editor: For heaven’s sake, man, have a little sense. If you attempt to put any name down I will scratch it out again.
Myself: O all right, you’re the boss.
IN DUBLIN’S College Green (Excuse me. In Dublin’s bus-humming pedestrian-jostling grey-colonnaded College Green) I met a poor man who was a stranger to these parts and who asked me to direct him somewhere. I did so with pleasure or at least with something that was meant to look like it. Then he pointed to a big building and said what’s that. I said that’s the Bank of Ireland. He said what do they be doing in there. Well, I said, banks lend money, you know. He looked wistfully at the Old House and said I wonder would they lend me ten bob. Why not try I said. Begor I think I will, he answered, a yellowish suffusion of worthless diluted blood mounting through his second-hand face, a symbol that the last thing to die in each of us is hope. Grey carrion soul-mincing hope, the one quality above all others that makes the human creature ridiculous and pathetic.
I left him, hoping he would drop dead. ‘Yesterday, an unknown man …’
ERWOOD STANDARD TYPEWR. Reason that out. It’s before me on my desk as I write. (That’s a phrase you often see in travel books—the jewelled and beaded purse of Stevenson, picked up for a few dhraksi in a junk shop in Samoa, if you could believe the boastful swine; before him on his desk as he writes. Can anybody write at anything but a desk?) But get back to this ERWOOD STANDARD TYPEWR. It’s all along the top of my machine in golden letters. Do you get it? My flying thumb, sweeping up a million times a year to whip back the carriage, has erased the last four letters of TYPEWR. The equally active other thumb, darting and re-darting to click the roller round, has wiped out the UND. There’s an explanation for everything old boy.
It’s fairly obvious I haven’t much to say today. Sow what? Sow wheat. Ah-ha, the old sow-faced cod, the funny man, clicking out his dreary blob of mirthless trash. The crude grub-glutted muck-shuffler slumped on his hack-chair, lolling his dead syrup eyes through other people’s books to lift some lousy joke. English today, have to be a bit careful, can’t get away with murder so easily in English. Observe the grey pudgy hand faltering upon the type-keys. That is clearly the hand of a man that puts the gut number one. Not much self-sacrifice there. Yes but he has a conscience, remember. He has a conscience. He does not feel too well today. He casts bleared cataractic (Gk. katarrhaktes) sub-glances over his past self. Why am I here? I want a straight answer that can be subjected to intellectual criteria. No, I know what you were going to say, you won’t put me off with that. Why is this man here? What for? Eats four fat meals a day, Wears clothes. Sleeps at night. Overpaid for incompetent work. Kept on out of pity for wife. Is worried. Ho ho. Feels dissatisfied with himself. Feels ought to be doing something. Feels … wrong. Not fulfilling duties of station in life. How often is the little finger raised per diem? Feels … dirty. Incapable of writing short bright well-constructed newspaper article, notwithstanding fact editors only too anxious print and pay for suitable articles, know man who took course Birmingham School of Journalism now earns 12,000 pounds in spare time. If you can write a letter you can write articles for newspapers. Editors waiting. Payment at the rate of one guinea per thousand words. Always enclose stamped envelope for return if unsuitable. Importance of neat typing. ERWOOD STANDARD TYPEWR. Editors have not time to study decipher puzzle out illegible scrawls on both sides of paper. Covering note not essential. But if desired brief courteous note saying take liberty of submitting for consideration literary article on how spent summer holidays. Or the humours of stamp collecting.
Remember once being stuffed in hot German train (before present war, of course), O a long time ago, forget what year it was, maybe ’33 or ’34. Courteous offizier present rauching long cheroot. Me, pointing out window: Bitte, ist das der Donau? Kolonel-major mit merry gold-dented smile: Nein, nein, das ist die Donau. Then the red hot bubbly blush.*
Print is one extreme of typographical development, the other being mathematical notation. It consists, in the occident anyway, of the representation of sounds by purely arbitrary shapes, and arranging them so that those in the know can reproduce the spoken words intended. This process is known as Reading, and is very uncommon in adults. It is uncommon because, firstly, it is in many cases frankly impossible, the number of phonetic symbols being inadequate; secondly, because of the extreme familiarity of the word-shapes to a population whose experience is necessarily derived in the main from marks printed on paper. It is in this second circumstances, familiarity with the word or phrase shapes, that has led to the unpremeditated birth of a visual language.
Now, you (yes, YOU) before you tear this paper into little bits, kindly tell me whether that last paragraph was written by me as part of my satanic campaign against decency and reason or whether it is taken from a book written in all seriousness by some other person. On your answer to that query will depend more than I would care to say in public.
Mister Quidnunc is even more stimulating today than usual. Turn to his little corner and have the time of your life.
THERE IS a lot of talk nowadays about repatriating our foreign acids. The agitation has my heartiest support. I have a tank of citric acid standing in Lisbon for the past two years, but so far I have been denied shipping space. The tank is on the quays, and is being depleted seriously by the inroads of marmalade-loving lascars, who loot oranges and sugar from other sources and then must have some of my citric acid to complete their yellow palate-corroding brew.
Lavoisier, incidentally, took the view that acids were binary oxygenated compounds, and that the associated water was an extraneous passive ‘element’, which served merely as a solvent. He was really the daddy of the absurd theory that all acids are monobasic. An ancestor of my own (who landed at Killala when Ireland called and at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular) was all for the theory of polybasicity, and proved his point in the teeth of scurrilous opposition from Lavoisier and butties like Guy-Lussac and Gmelin, who were no better. That was a long time ago, of course.
I read that Ireland’s acids in England are valued at £300,000,000. They are mostly organic acids of the carboxyl group, but we have several tanks of malonic and succinic acids and many thousands of cans of miscellaneous acids where the intrusion of carbon atoms (no doubt the work of persons who have no love for Ireland) makes classification according to empirical molecular formulae out of the question. How this vast accumulation of bitterness can be transported to this country after the war, or what possible use we would have for it, I cannot imagine.
The Plain People of Ireland: You’re right there, we have enough bitterness in this country.
Myself: We have bedad.
The Plain People of Ireland: But of course the sulphuric is very handy for the batteries.
Myself: Aye indeed.
This dripped off my assembly belt the other night (when I could have sworn I had the machines turned off for the night). Print it on barley-fudged crême-primed Hungarian sub-paper in good, old 12-point Gracatia Sancta and next thing you know I will have hair on my face and I will perceive indubitably Marxian strata in the subconscious, suggesting that all irrational impulses etc. etc. etc.
the antic soul
rides the wry, red brain;
horses know horses know
what they’re thinking about
(you might say curse that alien corn),
the bloody heart
lusts in its foul tenement
o blow, viaticum pump, blow
on your last glazed fruit-valves.
Stuff the breast of the chicken with some of the sausage meat. Place the sugar thermometer in the syrup while it is boiling. Withdraw the pan from the burner as soon as the correct temperature has been reached. Wash the sago. Mix the cornflour into a paste with some of the cold milk. Fill with prepared paste, using either a hot knife or a forcing pipe. Transfer to a tin lined with greased paper and bake for 1 hr. 45 minutes with the Regulo at Mark 4. Mix and turn out on a floured board, shape into cutlets, coat with the egg and bread crumbs and fry in hot fat for the rest of your natural.
WALKING the other day through Dublin’s motorcar-denuded pinknailed-damsel-crowded O’Connell street (the broadest thoroughfare in Europe remember) I noticed with a start that the Bank of Ireland’s office is surmounted by the motto BONA FIDES REIPUBLICAE STABILITAS. In plain English, this means, ‘Bona fides* are the standby of the State’. Mark that. Not merely are those nocturnal beerswillers and liquorslobberers worthy people, valuable citizens, delightful souls that one likes to know: they are the backbone and the be-all of all we mean by ‘Ireland’. By their existence they make possible our existence as an independent state. They are a sort of elated élite, a hiccup-shaken Herrenvolk. That’s what the Bank of Ireland says.
What then is the reason for this? Most of us pay the State a lot of money in direct taxation in the course of our daily struggle to preserve life and reach our beds once more intact—threepence on this and twopence on that. But your bona-fide, who also does the same, is only starting out on his grandiose tasks of tax-paying when the rest of us are going to bed. He will journey into the wilds on the bitterest night, spend the still watches far from the snug company of wife and child and journey back in the dawn bereft of speech and money but gloriously distended with all that is best and excisable in Irish life. Sixty tax-bearing cigarettes have made the wind rattle in his scorched neck like a crow caught in a chimney; the dry barren husk of old disused drink loiters loathsomely through his haggard entrails; he has lost his cheque-book and a button has been wrenched from his coat: but he is happy, he has made a daring bid to maintain the Supply Services and has not scrupled to face poverty, ill-health and dishonour that the Central Fund might be saved.
Yes, life is like that. You never know who is saving your bacon behind your back, you never think. Who will send me subscriptions for the erection of a statue in O’Connell street to The Unknown Traveller? Let his back be turned politely to Father Mathew and brave unflinching eyes turned towards the Swords Road and all the havens of sweet snug-bound far-niente which that way lie.
And talking of the Bank of Ireland, I came across the other day a copy of the Report of the Banking Commission. The Majority Report was annotated here and there marginally by an unknown hand in the following terms:
Paragraph 25 is tendentious rubbish.
Paragraph 21 is muck.
No.
Senile decay.
What about the advances to farmers in the years 1920–21?
Where???
‘Normal times’ have no relevance to ‘the problem of liquidity’, even if it be granted that the problem exists at all.
Ye Gods!
Oh Yeah!
Blah!
Tautology.
All very simple.
What about the deposits created by the banks to be lent to people in whose names they are created?
(At a time when) (our ever-dwindling fuel supplies) (bid fair) (to write finis) (to the most valiant efforts) (of the powers that be) (to maintain efficient transport services) (no words that I can say seem strong enough) (to express my abhorrence) (of ignorant fuel-wasting full-regulator men).
I am having serious trouble in the management of my slum property. Penal legislation has made us landlords responsible for major repairs and sanitation, even if our tenants spend their spare time deliberately tearing our tenements to bits and trying to burn the bits in our own grates (and very expensive modern Hammond Lane jobs some of them are, installed in 1936 regardless of expense). My point is this. Supposing one of my gables develops a bulge. My tenant (who does not know his prayers but could recite the entire Landlord and Tenant Act for you without once drawing breath) flies off to the Corporation and makes his due statutory whine. Next thing I know I have a notice slapped in on me, whereas and unless, I send for my handyman and tell him to square up this bulge and see about doing some plastering and pointing and so forth. Then after a day or two an inspector from the Corporation turns up when I happen to be having a look at what my handyman has done—a perfect job, as a matter of fact, as good as new. The inspector picks his teeth and squints up at the gable. Then he puts his nail on the plaster and begins to scrape. Then he begins to tap here and there with his cheap folding pocket rule. Then scarcely without a glance at me he says:
ALL THAT’LL HAVE TO COME DOWN.
I get as pale as a ghost and tell him to listen here, that the job cost me twenty-five pounds and that I can produce the contractor’s bill. The inspector is in the middle of a new slit-eyed squint and without turning his head says:
THAT’LL ALL HAVE TO COME DOWN THAT’S ALL THERE’S TO IT IT’LL ALL HAVE TO COME DOWN THE WHOLE LOT’LL HAVE TO BE TAKEN DOWN.
I stutter some thing about seeing further about it and having no intention of being robbed and bested by any inspector after landing out twenty-five good-looking pounds to a well-known and respected firm of building contractors. But the voice comes again:
THE WHOLE LOT’LL HAVE TO COME DOWN I’M SORRY BUT THAT IS ALL THERE IS TO IT THAT’LL ALL HAVE TO BE TAKEN DOWN.
I ask you.
TWO THINGS are required remember for a tryst, rendezvous or appointment. It is necessary to specify (a) time, and (b) place. Let me make my meaning clear. I want to avoid all ambiguity. Supposing I tell some girl or other that I will meet her at 8.30 p.m., thus specifying (a) but not (b). What happens? She turns up promptly enough at, say, the house where Dean Swift was born in Hoey’s Court. But in the meantime I am waiting patiently in the Bull Ring, Wexford, listlessly inhaling fag after fag. Result: we fail to meet and letters of passionate recrimination are on their way in the next post.
Now let us turn from that and take the opposite case. I tell the lady to meet me outside the picture house in Skerries. Please note that in this case we are ignoring (a). She turns up at 1.18 p.m., waits for an hour and flounces off in a huff. I, however, (connoisseur of clichés that I am) put in that odd thing—an appearance—at 4.53 p.m. Again I produce the box of fags and embark on another of my lengthy incinerations. People passing say: I wonder who your man is waiting for. Your man has been standing there for an hour. Your man is up to something, that’s a certainty.
See my point? The appointment is again broken, simply because we neglected to provide for both (a) and (b). Next time your girl fails to turn up, ask yourself whether you have followed the simple rule I have outlined.
WE LIVE in strange times. It can now be revealed that there has been in existence for the past year (notwithstanding anything that may be contained in the Offences against the State Act) a body known as the Royal Myles na gCopaleen Institute of Archaeology (and you can bet your life that the latter term embraces Palaeontology, Eolithic, Palaeolithic and Neolithic Anthropology). Some months ago this body sent an expedition to Corca Dorcha (or Corkadorky), the most remote Gaeltacht area in Ireland or anywhere else. Violent excavations have been in progress since, and preliminary reports which are reaching Dublin from the explorers indicate that discoveries are being made which may mean the end of civilisation as we know it; and the end, too, of all our conventional concepts of human, social, artistic, geological and vegetable evolution. If these messages are to be believed, the Corkadorky researches will throw again into the melting pot the whole sad mess of Tertiary Man, Sir Joseph Prestwich’s theory of the essentially pleistocene palaeolithic character of the Kent ‘plateau-gravels’, Stonehenge, the glacier theories, the ‘proofs’ of European neolithic eskimo stratigraphs, and even show that the gigantic mammalian skeletons which are honourably housed in our museums are fakes of the first order, perpetrated by ‘Irish’ Iberian flint-snouted morons (c. 6,000 B.C.) who practised the queer inverted craft of devising posterity’s antiquities.
Local observers are hourly awaiting the emergence of the Corkadorky Man, who is expected to prove himself the daddy of every other Man ever pupped by scholarly dirt-shovellers. Unlicensed short-wave radio transmitters are standing by to flash the news to the learned societies of the world. Herr Hoernes, the famous author of Der diluviale Mensch in Europa, is maintaining a 24-hour watch at the earphones in Stockholm with M. Mortillet, whose Le Préhistorique is still read.
A word about this Royal Myles na gCopaleen Institute of Archaeology. There is some mystery about the ‘Royal’, many commentators holding that the term has reference to the bar of a certain theatre where it is alleged the first meeting was held and the learned objects of the Institute defined. Be that as it may, it would be rash to suppose that the Institute is just a gatherum of clay-minded prodnoses. Every branch of research has a sub-institute of its own and the heavily documented reports of each sub-institute are appraised, co-ordinated, catalogued, sifted, indexed, cross-referenced, revised, checked and digested by the ‘Royal Institute’, which is essentially an assessive, deductive and archivistic body. Within the ‘Royal Institute’ you have, for instance, the Institute of Comparative Bronzes. This body is concerned only with time-bronze progressions (mostly based on millennial variations in the obliquity of the earth’s orbit) and has already disproved practically every thing that has appeared in L’Anthropologie: Matériaux pour l’histoire primitive de l’homme, the somewhat inexact French publication. Then again you have the Association of Superior Muck. This body is composed of chemists who spend their time surveying the testing samples of alluvial muck and all manner of water-borne ordure. All this goes to show that the researches now in progress have no relation to scare journalism, ‘all that is best in Irish life’, ‘progress’, or any other shibboleth. It is an exercise in scientific discovery and deduction. There is no margin for emotion, conjecture or error. That is why Herr Hoernes stays up all night in Stockholm.
I have no intention of entering into the contents of the perturbing preliminary reports I have mentioned, or describing the larger objects stated to have been dug up. I illustrate here, however, a few of the smaller and less disturbing relics which were unearthed. The figures shown over are carved in stone. As a laymen I do not know what to make of them. The lower stone seems to be a representation of primitive greyhound racing, with every chance that our friend in front will clock 30.15. The upper stone may mean that we once had a national sport of fish-racing.
An observer on the spot, and who assisted in some of the excavations, has given me a somewhat far-fetched story which I pass on for what it is worth (and not, mark you, for what it is not worth). According to him the primeval human remains unearthed were fossilised, and bore on the legs certain serrated markings that suggested corduroy. Various other aspects of hair remains, neckwear remains and whatnot provided an impressive accumulation of evidence that the Corkadorky Man was an Ice Age fly-boy and the progenitor of the present indefeasible Irish nation. It will be a nice cup of tea for the G.A.A. if this is proved to be the case.
I will have more to say on this subject.
A SPECIAL despatch from the explorers sent to Corkadorky by the Royal Myles na gCopaleen Institute of Archaeology states that large masses of diorite rock have been unearthed. The rocks look like adamellite and contain orthoclase, plagioclase felspar, micropegmanite starch, igneous hornblende, baking soda, gangrene-pale pyroxene, not to mention andesine strata tinged with accessory deposits such as zircan and apatite.
The Plain People of Ireland: Begob appetite is right, you’d need a square meal and a pint of stout after that mouthful of chat. What book did you cog all them jawbreakers out of?
Myself: The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The Plain People of Ireland: And a fine man he is when he’s at home, God bless him.
The savants sent to Corkadorky by the Royal Myles na gCopaleen Institute of Archaeology continue to send back curious despatches. The latest says that the Corkadorky Man is at last a reality. It appears that he is streets ahead of the famous Monmouthshire Man, nor has he anything to fear from Iceland’s renowned Stelvik Man. He is one of the most interesting men ever discovered, and while an account of his more singular characteristics must be postponed to a future article, I may say here that one remarkable feature about him is the right index finger. Beyond yea or nay, it is the longest finger ever encountered by anthropologists. The Long Finger of the Corkadorky Man has, in fact, fascinated the explorers, and keeps continually cropping up in their somewhat incoherent messages. There is a long indentation or sign of wear on the top of it and the archaeologists argue that this must be proof of the Man’s practice of putting things on the Finger and keeping them there for lengthy periods. ‘Lengthy periods’ in this context would, of course, mean centuries. This corroboration of the well-known folk idiom about putting things on the long finger is curious and may mean that the Corkadorky Man may explain for us at last why our record in the world as men of affairs has always been so miserable.
From inquiries I have made, I am glad to say that no traces of old fossilised meal have been found in the Man’s mouth and that the hands bear no traces of cheese or of the despised cheese-paring tool. That is something to be thankful for and something to be going on with.
A ROVING PARTY from the Myles na gCopaleen Institute of Archaeology have arrived in Killarney and have chosen to start excavating at the bottom of the lakes. It is a safe bet that nobody else in the world would have thought of doing that or anything like it. As usual, the operations have resulted in a flood of wild rumours. Preliminary messages arriving in Dublin say that the explorers have found that the bottom of the lake consists, not of the usual mess of muck and weeds one might expect, but first-grade waterproof concrete. The Institute contends that this (with other proofs they have) goes to show that Killarney is not a divine accident of nature or ‘heaven’s reflex’, but the personal handiwork of our crafty ancestors. If the Institute is correct, the whole hash of lake and mountain with its wealth of sublimely inconsequent nuance was carried out with hod, trowel, plumb-line and muck-bucket. It seems also that the whole place is a network of hot pipes and that it is thus that the sub-tropical vegetation effects were got. The pipes are buried at varying depths and are said to be connected with hot subterranean spas in Clare and places even more distant. Apparently what the Institute is getting at is that the whole of Ireland is a vast construction job and that we have nobody but ourselves to thank for our peerless scenery. Sea shells have been found on top of the Devil’s Mountain, proving that sea-level soil was heaped up by human agency to make the mountain. It is thought that the Firbolgs (or ‘Bagmen’) were the slave-artisans who did the carrying work in primitive times. The large hollow left by the excavation necessary to construct even a small mountain was always carefully concreted and filled with water.
The savants who are in Kerry hope to produce a Killarney Man in due course. What they intend to do with him we can only guess.
A MAN I know got wind last week that cloves were going to be rationed. He was cute and set about buying up every vestige of this commodity that was on offer. Carts, vans and boys on bicycles began to arrive in an endless stream at his modest suburban house. Soon the place was packed out from floor to ceiling with barrels, boxes and sacks full of cloves. He had managed to corner about half the nation’s supply, and possibly could be excused the chilly Shylock smile that had begun to creep about his well-kept clock. He got a nice let-down, with parsley on it, when he learnt later that it was clothes—not cloves—the people had been talking about.
Of course there’s a moral in this. Be careful lest you inadvertently season your hot whiskies and pies with old clothes.
Waiter, what’s this?
That’s a bit of an old shirt, sir.
What—in a pie?
Yessir. We couldn’t get cloves, sir, so we had to use an old shirt, sir.
The result would be no tip, of course.
Talking of the general question of supplies, could not our foodstuffs be augmented by doing something about the many thousands of mealy-mouthed persons we have in this country? The meal could be extracted from their mouths, sterilised and packed away in sacks. (And please don’t blather to me about the legal snags in such a matter or the ‘liberty of the subject’—you can do anything from frying onions to squirting old chocolate on a fly boy’s yellow shirt under the Emergency Powers Act).
And then what about all the cheese-paring types we have also? Why can’t we collect all the cheese-parings, melt them down into 1lb lumps and add them to our dwindling stock of vitaminous eatables? All we want is a little bit of organisation and energy.
All right, you don’t like your eggs hard. Very well. But stay. Do you feel hot and angry when some unspeakable hack writes: ‘This book is like the curate’s egg—good in parts’? Does that hideous cliché make you close your fist in murderous resolve? Does it kill you? Very well. Look at my machine.
The hollow central cylinder A slides over the other cylinder B, containing a notch in which the trigger C will catch when the upper cylinder is pressed down. Put the whole shooting gallery into a saucepan of cold water, press down A until the eggs are immersed, lock all doors, pull down the blinds, hang some crêpe on the hall door and then light the forbidden gas. As soon as the eggs are cooked, the pressure of steam will release the trigger and the spring in the central cylinder will yank up the eggs clear of the water and at the same time raise the lid of the saucepan. By a screw attachment to the trigger the time of cooking may be regulated. The machines are thirty shillings each, direct from this office.
The idea came to me in 1893, when I was firing the Dublin-Drogheda run.
Myles na gCopaleen has left 31 Westmoreland street, and will be away for twenty-nine years.
WE ALL MAKE his praise: William Shakespeare. Governs a nice quiet land: Victoria, England’s queen. Do you get it? Anagrams. Not everybody can make good anagrams and hardly anybody can do the smart job I’ve done above—make another phrase appropriate to the phrase worked upon.
Now in your father’s day making anagrams was a polite occupation and was encouraged in girls’ schools. But, of course, all that is changed, old boy. If you were found nowadays sitting in an old rose garden making anagrams, people would ask you to run messages for them, or keep nix while the new lodger’s letters are being steamed. Indeed now, faith, times change. Well do I remember taking my seat on the first train ever run on the old Kingstown Atmospheric Railway, using a pass kindly given to me by my old friend, Sir Albert Hall. Your mother, child, was the engine driver. How we met is another story, and one not entirely without charm. Hand me my old album there till I show you my 1876 sprig of fern.
To come back for a moment, the Northern Premier said recently that ‘Sir Dawson Bates enjoyes my implicit confidence.’ The Oxford Dictionary says that the word implicit means ‘entangled, entwined…: implied though not plainly expressed…: resting on the authority of another, as ‘implicit faith, belief’, etc. Hence erroneously, absolute, unmitigated.’
It is a nice thing to find that the King’s English is as weak in Belfast as elsewhere. What must these people’s Irish be like?
OFTEN I SIT here remembering, the eye glazed and meditative, beautiful in reverie despite the old trachoma scars. I often wonder does anybody remember as much as I. The great Irish Language Procession of 1903, yes, we all remember that. I wheeled the first Irish-built bicycle in it. But do you remember the Tottenham Court road in that terrible winter of 1876, the dark slime on the road, the slow clip-clop of walking horses, the foul icy fog punctured for a second by a drab lighting a cigarette with a pale lucifer match? Shaw and I often look back on those days, but there’s no nostalgia nonsense about us. Neuralgia, if anything.
I am continually overhearing chat like this, and I (make you a present of it) (for what it is worth).
Do I know the Bottle-o’-Bass Quinn? Do I kn—? Do I—? (Here there is simulated incoherence and inarticulateness to convey that the question is almost comically unnecessary.)
Do I KNOW him? Sure didn’t we go to school together man.
But do you know what it is. I wouldn’t know him now if I saw him.
You would boy you would then, he’s always the same.
Is that a fact?
The Bottle-o’-Bass didn’t grow older … and he didn’t grow younger in the last twenty years.
Well is that a fact now. Do you know what it is, the Bottle-o’-Bass was a topper. A topper.
What’s that you said? (This is the fiction of deafness, which conveys that the statement made is so obviously true that it is an abuse of speech to make it at all.)
I said he was a topper.
A topper …? (A pause here and a lowering of pitch.) Do you know what it is Bottle-o’-Bass was too good that’s what he was he was too good.
You might well say it sure he was a cousin of me own.
Many’s the time I’d go down there selling fish and no matter what hour of the morning it was you had to go in and there was a big mug of tea planted down in front of you.
I believe you, I believe you.
And if you wouldn’t take it …
I know, there’d be a sour …
And if you were there about lunch time begob in you’d have to go there like the rest of them.
I can believe it of him.
And if you went along there around tea-time …
If you didn’t go in you were the worst in the world.
Ah yes, the Bottle-o’-Bass…
HERE IS SOMETHING I bet you did not know—that your second finger (beside the little finger) is longer than the other one beside it, all appearances and preconceived notions to the contrary. Lay your hand palm down on the table and measure both fingers carefully along the left edge.
Some days ago, when Caucasian Armavir was captured, I was thinking of trying to link the event with prophetic Virgil. (qui ce-cinit ca-casum Troiae). But my restless wasplike mind moved away from Troy to Troytown, from that to Shawn Spadah and thence to noble Orby that sleeps under the great rock at Boss Crokers in Glencairn. You are too young to remember them but they were kingly animals, each of them carried enough real nobility in one fetlock to blast skyhigh all the egalitarian spoof ever mouthed by your unkempt work-shy Marxists. I had five shillings on Troytown (borrowed from one of our gardeners) and that night, with no warning at all, I asked that pink empire of flesh which I own to deal with its first bottle of Guinness’s stout, brewed within a stone’s throw of the little house where first I saw the light of day. I was fourteen, I think, on the day when Troytown showed them all what an Irish horse was, and I remember being afraid to go home while carrying internally my tuppence-worth of infantile inebriation. But the grandfather, with whom I was staying, had also known a thing or two that day and was above in the bedroom being undressed by the gardeners. To this day I hear his frenzied screams of ‘Up the Boers!’
Troytown. Troy. As yes. How time flies! How the bird wingeth! How fast the great black oxen trample us down, in a wild phantom mess of Disney technicolour! Why do we wonder at war today and blame poor Baldwin when the earliest surviving flights of the human intellect could deal with nothing else? Arma virumque cano.
There is some Hungarian Count Kano concerned in the present Krieg, on one side or another. Arma virumque Kano?
Or what about Armagh virumque cano?
Remember my old one? You can’t have your Caucasus and eat it.
When is a sign refreshing?
When it is of the times.
When does it boil down to the same thing?
When all is said and done.
What does a thing suffer through the centuries?
Many vicissitudes.
In what is the origin of the Irish round towers shrouded?
The mists of antiquity.
You have discovered by now, I suppose, that the statement made at the beginning of this article is a lie. Do you realise that I have thieved several seconds of your life from you without a hope of recompense? Your little store of time is smaller. The bird, etc. And good enough it is for you, sticking your beak into the papers when you should be working.
If you are a lady, please overlook the asperity of my tone. Sit down and on mauve note-paper of rarest fragrance write me a letter that reeks with passion, with the warm travail of the heart. That will keep me quiet for a while.
THE POST OFFICE has asked me to explain in detail how to make a ‘Personal’ Trunk Call. (Is that your personal trunk, Miss Garbo, or is it only a lay figure?)
The particulars of the call should be given to the Trunk Operator (who, being an elephant, will remember them), as follows:—
(a) Assuming that Mr Kelly (Killanne 12345) wants to speak to Mr Doyle (Erin 9876), or, failing him, Mr Burke (of Messrs Kelly Burke and Shea, Solicitors, Commissioners for Oaths, Parliamentary Agents and Registered Undertakers); Mr Kelly should say: ‘Erin 9876, Mr Doyle or Mr Burke (of Kelly, Burke and Shea) wanted by Dublin 12345, Mr Kelly.’
(b) If Mr Kelly wants to speak only to Mr Doyle, Erin, who may be at another telephone station in the same local fee area, he should give this other telephone number as a second choice. If Mr Doyle (or, indeed, Mr Burke) cannot be found, or will not be available until later, Mr Kelly will be so informed, and it will be ‘open to him’ (as civil service cliché-mouthers would have it) to slip down to the local public house for a pint (unless it is closed to him).
That is how the telephone book has it, and I suppose it is all simple enough. But I wonder is it? Suppose you can’t (for the life of you) remember Doyle’s name? Supposing you’ve forgotten your own name—a situation not uncommon with professional debtors? Supposing your humping name isn’t Kelly—this last is my own problem? The G.P.O. seems to think that Dublin is Baile Atha Kelly be the look of things. Supposing you ring up Myles na gCopaleen and a lady answers, what then? Supposing you could swear it was your wife’s voice? Supposing the whole telephone installation falls out of the wall and crushes your feet? Supposing you cut the finger off yourself trying to get your pennies back? Supposing you smash your nail, break it right across the middle after accidentally bending it back until it—
The Plain People of Ireland: Thop that! THOP!
Myself: All right, squeamish.
There is another thing about the telephone. At least once in a life-time one’s telephone call happens to be answered by a person who had never used the telephone before, a young maid, possibly, or an imbecile gardener. You say ‘Hello’. Back comes an answering hello. Then you say:
‘This is Mr Doyle Erin speaking. Could I speak to Mr Burke of Kelly, Burke and Shea?’
‘Hello.’
That is the sole reply. Then you say loudly:
‘Hello. This is Mr DOYLE ERIN. Could I speak to Mr BURKE?’
‘Hello.’
‘Hello! This is Mr Doyle Erin. Will you please listen to what I am saying, this is most important and urgent. I arranged with Mr Burke yesterday that I should ring him today at this hour to confirm a tentative business arrangement. Is he there, please?’
‘Hello.’
Then you drop the overheated supercharged tone and drop to the steely ‘conversational’ voice in which an American gangster says Listen, Bugs, just turn your back and walk over there, I’m not going to do a thing to you. Thanks Bugs. BANG!
‘Listen,’ you say, ‘will you please tell me is Mr Burke there?’
‘Hello.’
‘I said will you please tell me is Mr Burke there?’
‘Hello.’
‘Is Mr Burke there?’
‘Hello.’
‘Is MR BURKE THERE, DAMN YOU?’
‘Hello.’
The illiterate stupid … clodbrained … half-witted … platter-faced … cuckoo. Hello. Hello. YAH! Yah. YAH!
RECENTLY I HAD a word to say about a certain literary man’s ‘laurels’ and the advice he received to ‘look’ to them. The other day I was passing the house of another literary man and it occurred to me to call to see how his laurels were (faring) and what he was doing with them. I found him resting on them. Squatting there with his gross carcase on a heap of the decayed vegetation, he looked (for all the world) like a clucking buzzard perched on some jungle eyrie trying to digest some unspeakable feed while hatching its own evil eggs.
We talked for four hours, and the entire conversation (I may say) was in French. And never once (let me add) did he ask me whether I had a mouth on me. He is one of the old crowd.
I read somewhere the other day (by mistake, I was looking for something else) that the great motor car manufacturers are continuing for the duration of the war to design ‘phantom’ models of their vehicles, one new one every year, each improving on its predecessor, but that the public is to be kept in ignorance of all this. After the war (if that means anything) the first model to be (launched) will be as much an improvement on 1939’s model as 1939 was on 1910, the year I bought the old De Dion from your uncle Joe. This is awful nonsense. By 1978—not that I suppose your men will have laid off their scrapping by then—I’ll certainly have forgotten how to drive the 1939 car (first, down, second up and across and so on—I ask you, how could a poor blind rheumatic old man like me be expected to (turn round) (all over again) and learn how to drive these divilish newfangled injins of 1978?). Sure ’tis nonsense, boy, nonsense.
And wait. Supposing this strictly private progress is also carried on in (other spheres)? What then? Suppose Montague Burton in his secret laboratory turns out each year a phantom lounge suit, gradually streamlining it, knocking off a pocket here, a lapel there, changing the trousers, taking them off, turning the waistcoat back to front, sewing the buttons on inside, coming out with two spare sleeves as well as the usual two, eventually throwing aside all accepted dress theories in favour of some mad invention (in shark-skin probably) buttoning down the back with a pair of stainless steel elastic breeches, hollow glass-tiled shoes and a hat with a periscope and a radiogram that turns records over and plays them upside-down and pours out drink for you and your pals every time you press the button on the zip fastener at the back of your neck. What decent Irishman would be seen in that rig-out matther a damn what year is in it? Sure it’s nonsense, nonsense, Jack, do you see. You can’t believe all the stuff you read in the papers, boy, no, sir, not by—
Not by what extended calcinated writing tool?
THE OTHER DAY I was reading that man down there on the right—£nunc*—and I caught him saying this:
‘If you have the bones of a typewriter lying in an attic they are worth money today.’
This seems reasonable enough until we bring (to bear) upon it our whole fatuous battery of professional paranoia, perversion and catachresis, rushing out with our precast vaudeville clown-routine of quotation, misinterpretation and drivelling comment. Does the result please anyone, bring the most faded polite laugh, the most tenuous giggle, the most bilious sneer?
Well, all I can say is this: if I have the bones of a typewriter, £nunc can do nothing for me, Harry Meade can do nothing for me, Barniville can do nothing for me, and it’s a sure thing I won’t be lying in an attic reading this newspaper’s advice on how to make money. I’ll be stuffed into some circus and billed above the Bearded Lady. On payment of sixpence you will be permitted to view my unique bones through some X-ray gadget.
Remington I knew well. He had the whole of his insides taken out of him, bones and all, when he was a lad—he was suffering from diffused chrythomelalgia—and had new bones made for him out of old typewriters. And, mark this, when he grew up, he was as fine a looking man as you’d meet in a dazed walk. (No, no, no, put away that pencil, I didn’t mean you to mark it that way. I meant you to read, mark, and inwardly digest, that’s all.)
In middle life Remington discovered that he had a weak chest and (what would do him), (only) have a complete brand-new typewriter built into the upper part of his metal torso. Occasionally he would accidentally tap down a key or two when leaning against counters or bridge-parapets. People said that mysterious tips for horse races were often found on his internal roller; (be that as it may) (certain it is) that he never went out without a sheet of paper stuck in his ‘carriage’.
I well remember an embarrassing incident that occurred—I think it was the year of the split—the last time I was talking to him. (What would do me) (only) get into a political argument with him. I kept (on) tapping him on the chest to bring home all my points. Only when I heard the tinkle of a little muffled bell did I remember that I was talking to no ordinary man. Did he take offence? Not old Bill Remington. With exquisite refinement he excused himself, turned away, and inserting a hand under his waistcoat, drew back the carriage. I often wonder what stupid motto I typed out during that encounter. ‘Up the Prince of Wales’ or something, I suppose.
Poor old Underwood and that astute statesman, Smith Premier, were also men who had the typewriter in their bones. I knew them well. Decenter men never stood in that substance one associates with hot feet—shoe lather.
Towards the end of Premier Smith’s life he was a sick man. And at what was he a very sick man?
At that.
But old George Underwood was a bright soul, always up to practical jokes and harmless rascality, you couldn’t have a party without him. What shrill acoustical phenomenon was he?
A scream.
I FIND IT very hard to conquer this neurotic weakness of mine, reading newspapers. In this (very) paper the other day I read the following:
‘The Department of Defence announces that persons who are not in receipt of a military service pension, or in possession of a military service certificate entitling such persons to a pension, must apply for a medal to the Secretary, Department of Defence. Such application will not be necessary from persons in receipt of a military service pension or in possession of a certificate.’
I’m not very sure about this. Suppose the population of this country is three millions and suppose that 5,000 citizens have these pensions or certificates. That leaves a total of 2,995,000 persons who must apply for a medal. For that proprietary fraction, my own part, I have no objection (in the world) to applying for this medal, providing reasonable arrangements are made to deal with the vast hordes of people who will be converging on the Department of Defence. But I have one serious doubt. Is there not an important principal at stake here? Is it wise to compel so many people to apply for a medal? Is it judicious to introduce into our democratic civilisation the ugly word ‘must’? If I concede the right of a state department to compel me to apply for a medal today, how do I know that tomorrow I will not be compelled to call to some dispensary and swallow a bar of chemical chocolate? And the day after to have all my teeth extracted in the public interest? Do réir a chéile seadh tuitid na caisleáin.
Conceiving my liberty to be threatened, therefore, I have decided after the fullest consideration of all the relevant facts (funny how nobody bothers considering the irrelevant facts) to refuse to apply for this medal, and if need be to suffer jail or any other punishment that may be (visited) upon my head. (I digress again to remark that I am thankful that punishment is always confined to the head, which is a thickly-boned eminence and well able to endure it.)
Of course, I realise the awful futility of all this. I make a noble gesture in the cause of human liberty. I will not apply for or accept a medal. I sacrifice myself. I go to jail. I suffer. I lose weight. It is whispered that I am ill, nay, dying. People pray for me. Meetings are held. The public conscience is moved. A protest comes from the Galway County Council. There is a strike in Portarlington. Milk churns are upset at Athlone railway station. From my lone cell I issue an appeal to the people of Ireland to remain calm. High political personalities are closely guarded. Anonymous ballad-mongers sanctify my cause. The public temper mounts. Sligo County Council makes its voice heard (in no uncertain manner). The Banner County is next with a sternly-worded resolution. The Gaelic League comes into the open, calling me a martyr. Muintir na Tire dissolves itself as a token of mourning. The sea-divided Gael, meeting in solemn conclave, at Chicago, pledges its ‘inalienable community of feeling with the people of Ireland in their devotion to the glorious martyr now lodged in the citadel of Mountjoy.’
And it all works. I am released. Cheering crowds bear me from the grim fortress. It is 8.15 of a winter’s night. Grotesque torchlights enflame the city. I am wheeled away in Parnell’s coach. Massed piper’s play ‘A Nation Once Again’. Where are we going? Dorset Street, O’Connell Street, Nassau Street. The Mansion House! Doyle is there and all the boys. The wan emaciated figure is assisted to the platform. Speeches. Different people keep standing up and sitting down. Speeches speeches speeches. Then I find that some very distinguished person has walked over to myself and is talking to me. What’s this? I struggle to my feet. What has he there? A little black box. More talk. Then he opens it. A medal!
Then the crowd goes mad, but they don’t feel half as mad as I do.
HERE’S ANOTHER THING I read in this paper recently:—
‘When your unlocked bicycle disappears from the kerb of some unfrequented side-street, you can have no grouse coming—it happens every day of the week—but when the office stair carpet vanishes from under your eyes it is time to get perturbed. At that stage you unhook the nearest phone and communicate with the law.’
I don’t get it. Look. There you are, miraculously enough, in an unfrequented side-street, your bike propped at the kerb, and behind you a hired thug in tweeds, clutching a shotgun. Suddenly the bike is gone. What I want to know is—why must it be assumed that there is no possibility whatever of the chance appearance of those dun-feathered fowl? That a carpet should magically disappear from under our feet may be surprising, but surely it is far more astounding that there should, in fact, ever have been a stair carpet under the feet of myself and my gunman when we are standing in an ‘unfrequented’ side-street waiting for a bicycle to vanish and for grouse not to appear. I mean. And worse, more complicated still, the carpet has also to vanish from under our eyes. The truth is very few people wear carpets under their eyes—though little bags knitted by Seán Jameson, yes.
And when this mysterious carpet vanishes, ‘at that stage you unhook the nearest phone and communicate with the law’. A tramcar stage, I suppose, although we are told it is an unfrequented side-street. And ‘unhook’? Alexandre Dumas Père? Period stuff. Unhooking phones, electric broughams, call me a hansom, you’re a hansom, Yellow Book, Wilde, Harris, Marie Lloyd, murder in gaslight.
Now let us consider the thing on another plane as the pilot said to the rear gunner. Your carpet is stolen by what this anonymous writer calls ‘light-fingered gentry’. Listen that’s nothing. I left the office here in Westmoreland street the other day for a drop of lunch at five o’clock, locked the front door so that none of the crowd could get out and spread lies about me when my back was turned. Back to the office punctually at a quarter to eleven. No office, no great newspaper building. Westmoreland street, yes, but no sign of the archaic buzantion facade behind which. Stolen, Locke, Stack and Birrell (three best backs Ireland ever had, Ernie Crawford was only trotting after them). What did I do? I unhooked the nearest telephone box and asked for Commissionaire Guard Sheehan Daniel Depoe Finished Pork. Look, I want to report a robbery. My offices at 31 Westmoreland street have been stolen. Could you help? Last seen wearing a handsome old-world front of no particular (recognisable) period, wears a brownstone moustache and speaks Greek fluently. Certainly sir, not at all sir, a pleasure sir. I went back to a certain place greatly relieved that (the matter) had been taken out of my hands (though not by a doctor). Cycling home at five I noticed that the building had been put back again. But in their hurry the light-fingered gentry had replaced it back to front. It looked very queer I can tell you.
We are now having the thing chained.
I CANNOT stand or understand the sort of typographical shouting that goes on in that hierofrantic sheet, my income tax form, and it would not surprise me in the least to learn that yours is the same. This sort of thing: ‘If you are a MARRIED MAN and your wife is living with you …’ I think it is very bad taste using those heavy black caps, as the convict said to the trial judges (pace Hanna J. and this thoughtful letter to Ireland’s premier finest most tunisian-minded newspaper, the Irish Times, all uncover, please). ‘If you are a MARRIED MAN.’ Undoubtedly there is some dreadful sneer intended here, some recondite official indecency that could be understood only in the underworld of please attach file, have you papers please, please speak, can you discharge file please, I am directed to say that the matter is under consideration.
‘If you are a MARRIED MAN and your wife is living with you.’ These hidden baroque-rats have the cool cheek (warm cheek for some reason is considered rare) to suggest that it is the exceptional thing in Ireland for a married man to have his wife living with him. One expects the formula to go on like this: ‘If, however, you are a MARRIED MAN and have your wife parked out in Shankill so that you will not be embarrassed by her fearful appearance, ludicrous “conversation” and appalling clothes, give her address and telephone number.’ Yes. But read the thing again. ‘If you are a MARRIED MAN and your wife is living with you …’ Supposing your wife is living with and you are not a married man (or even a MARRIED MAN), what then? What subtle poor oak rat’s distinction is being made here?
If I understand English, a wife is what a woman becomes after she is married and no account of equivocal chat can convince me that anybody other than a married man can have a wife. (I am assuming all the time that cab-horses, cows and cats are not regarded as being in receipt of (mark that lovely phrase, ‘in receipt of’) a taxable income. Why then the ‘if you are a MARRIED MAN’ when the word ‘wife’ follows on at once? Why not say ‘if you have a wife living with you …’? It would be too simple, I suppose. Incidentally, what is the legal meaning of ‘living’? Supposing I am a MARRIED MAN and my wife is dying with me? Yes, I see it. The cold official brain thinks of everything. They must insist on this word ‘living’. Leave it out, they will say, or even to change it to ‘if you are living with your wife’ and you will have all sorts of unprincipled persons claiming relief in respect of a wife who is (sure enough) sitting in the drawing room, very well preserved woman considering she died in 1924. Can you beat that for ghoulish circumspection? (It just occurs to me that there must have been a lot of official jargon in our jails in the oul days, have you file please, please attach file, is file with you please. Why this eternal tender supplication ‘please’)?
On the next page of the form I see CLAIM IN RESPECT OF PERSONAL ALLOWANCE (TO A MARRIED MAN), ‘HOUSEKEEPER’, CHILDREN, DEPENDENT RELATIVES, AND LIFE ASSURANCE PREMIUMS. Why this sneering sophistication of putting my housekeeper into inverted commas? The woman has a blameless character and makes that indigenous culinary complication, an Irish stew, that you would get up out off yoor bad en tha maddle off tha neight fur tay eet a wee bet off ut, d’yeh ondherstond me. Is a dependent relative what happens when you are unwise enough to say: I seen you with the man that you were speaking to whom? And why cannot I get relief in respect of dependent absolutes? The wife’s mother, for instance?
I will not harrow you with the dreadful mess that this form assumes you to be in ‘if you are an UNMARRIED PERSON’. Earlier it was a question of a MARRIED MAN; if you happen to be unmarried, you are only a PERSON, which I consider insulting and sinister. Furthermore, I see no provision for the situation where you are a MARRIED WOMAN and (decently enough) support your husband. Listen to this: ‘If you are an UNMARRIED PERSON having living with you … your mother.’ What gaucherie! Unmarried persons in Ireland do not have their mothers living with them, they live with their mothers.
Small wonder faith that nobody likes this wretched form. Small wonder every bank, insurance office and big business firm in the country is tearing down and building up its walls rather than pay. Please speak. Bah!
YEARS AGO when I was living in Islington a cub reporter in the service of Tay Pay, founder of that modern scourge, the ‘gossip column’, I had great trouble with my landlord. The man was a vulgar low bowler-hatted plumber who tortured me exquisitely by his vulgarity of dress, talk and aspect. The situation rapidly became Russian. Evenings in the yellow gaslight, myself immersed in a letter to George Harris or painfully compiling my first novel, the gross plumber audibly eating tripe in an armchair behind me. The succession—the crescendo of ‘Greek’ emotion—irritation—anger—loathing—then hatred. And then the quiet grey thought—I will do this creature in. I will do for him, gorblimey, if I have to swing for it!
It is funny how small things irk far beyond their own intrinsic significance. The way he sucked at his dirty pipe, too lazy or stupid to light it. The trick of never lacing his boots up completely. And his low boasting about his drinking. Forty-eight pints of cider in a Maidenhead inn. Mild and bitter by the gallon. I remember retorting savagely on one occasion that I would drink him under the table. Immediately came the challenge to do so. ‘Not now,’ I remember saying, ‘but sooner than you think, my good friend.’ That is the way we talked in those days. Possibly it was just then that I first formed my murderous resolution. But I digress.
When I had finally decided to murder this insufferable plumber, I naturally occupied my mind for some days with the mechanics of sudden death. I was familiar with the practice of homicide fashionable in the eighties, and I laid my plans with some care. I took to locking my bedroom so that the paraphernalia of execution could be amassed without arousing the suspicions of the patient. The chopper was duly purchased, together with a spare hatchet in case the plumber’s skull should withstand the chopper. I attended a physical culture class to improve my muscles. Alcohol and tobacco were discontinued. I took long walks on Sunday afternoons and slept with the window wide open. But most important of all—remember that I speak of the gaslit eighties—I purchased a large bath and the customary drums of acid.
I was then ready. The precise moment of execution did not matter so much. It would coincide with some supreme extremity of irritation. And it did. One evening re-opening the manuscript of my novel I discovered traces of tripe on the clean copper-plate pages. The wretched plumber had been perusing my private documents. I went upstairs whistling ‘The Girl in the Hansom Cab’, came down cheerfully with the chopper behind my back, and opened the ruffian’s skull from crown to neck with a haymaker of a wallop that nearly broke my own arm. The rest was simple. I carried the body up to my room and put it in the bath of acid. Nothing more remained but to put things in order for my departure next day for a week’s holiday with my old parents in Goraghwood, my native place.
When I returned to London, I went up to the bedroom with some curiosity. There was nothing to be seen save the bath of acid, I carried the bath down to the sitting room and got a glass. I filled the glass with what was in the bath, crept in under the table and swallowed the burning liquid. Glass after glass I swallowed till all was gone. It was with grim joy that I accomplished my threat that I would drink this plumber under the table. It was the sort of thing one did at the turn of the century.
WHEN A RESPECTABLE lady was up in court recently for removing not clothing but articles of clothing from a crowded shop when she thought nobody was looking, the District Justice remarked that there was far too much shop-lifting in Dublin, and then imposed (well, what can you impose?) a heavy sentence of imprisonment.
I suppose he was right when he said there was far too much shop-lifting in Dublin but I am not clear how one calculates what is the right amount of shop-lifting for Dublin. Would we be in a worse mess if there was too little shop-lifting? I think a small committee of D.J.’s should be convened to determine the optimum incidence of shop-lifting for Dublin and other urban centres and sentence only ladies who exceed their quota.
Another thing. God be with the days when I was in business meself. I opted for a gratuity when I left the Black and Tans and bought two small shops. I think it was groceries I was selling. I did very well and in no time had bought five others. Soon I was a chain-store king (although I’m going to be honest and admit that chains was the one thing we never stocked). But I’ll tell you what happened. I ran into a frightful epidemic of shop-lifting. First my Stoneybatter house was lifted, then the Inchicore one. The loss of the shops was bad enough but as well as that I got into trouble with the Corporation over the gaping empty sites. PLEASE REINSTATE MISSING PREMISES WITHIN TEN DAYS FAILING WHICH. Red ink.
Then in one week six other shops were lifted, including the head office, which contained a personable typist. One of the shop-lifters got qualms of (surely I needn’t say of what) and put the shop he had taken back but of course on the wrong site, it looked like a small boy in man’s clothes, it didn’t fit anywhere. Whereafter, of course, there was only one thing to do. We had to chain all the chain-stores. People thought this was odd and custom declined. Worse, my enemies started to taunt me about my ‘tied houses’. The only customers who did not desert me were the chainsmokers, who came to my chain-stores in the hope of getting chains, despite the fact that we never stocked the things. Ineffective custom of this kind was no use to me and I sold out to a wealthy Stater the year of the split. That was my only venture as an entrepreneur, which is a much nicer word than middle-man.
And now I have a letter here I want to answer. A correspondent (and he’s fairly substantial. I looked him up in Thom’s, PLV £38) asks me what is the meaning of the Dublin word ‘moppy’. He had overheard somebody saying that so-and-so was moppy. What did moppy mean? Well, here are a few synonyms.
Moppy; drunk; jarred; fluthered; canned; rotten; plasthered; elephants; fluthery-eyed; spiflicated; screwed; tight; mouldy; maggoty; full to the brim; footless; blind; spaychless; blotto; scattered; merry; well on; shook; inebriated; tanked up; oiled; well-oiled; cock-eyed; cross-eyed; crooked; boozed; muzzy; sozzled; bat-eyed; pie-eyed; having quantum sufficio; and under the influence of intoxicating liquor.
Curiously enough, the latter rather prim phrase is the only one used by the Gárda Siochána; they use it even when it emerges in the evidence that the defendant had only two small sherries in Swords, that he never takes drink, and that on the present occasion he was offered the sherry by his brother-in-law, who was celebrating a happy event.
Alas, the poor human.
TWO ATTITUDES are admissible in relation to roads: one, that there are not enough roads in this country and that more should be provided; two, that all existing roads should be ploughed up and wheat sown.
In relation to proposal No. 1, competent engineers have informed me that new roads could be most economically provided side by side with existing roads; this for the reason that road-making machinery can be readily and cheaply transported and operated on the existing roads. It must be borne in mind, however, that once a duplicate road has been constructed beside an existing road, the second road can itself be used as the ‘base’ for the construction of a third road; thus there is no considerable engineering difficulty in constructing an indefinite number of new roads provided they are located parallel and together. Hollows in the terrain can, of course be filled in with cement and eminences removed by mechanical excavators. It must be added, however—and I have the authority of an agricultural expert for saying this—that the construction of a large number of new roads in the manner suggested would tend to diminish tillage activities. Generally speaking, then, the proposal is feasible but open to objection by sectional interests.
Very well. Now as to proposal number two. The cultivation of wheat on roadways is not, I am advised, impossible; it would be, however, difficult and a successful crop could not be expected save at the cost of great skill and diligence in husbandry. Roadways of some centuries standing could not, of course, be dug or ploughed in the ordinary way. Excavation whether by mechanical means or with pick and shovel would be necessary. Arable soil would scarcely be reached at a lesser depth than 3 feet and thus a considerable quantity of material would have to be excavated to secure an arable trench of even moderate width. The disposal of this material presents a problem. Assuming that a stretch of roadway fifty miles long is to be prepared for wheat, it would be necessary to remove the material by motor lorry, starting from the remote extremity; this for the reason that since the roadway is disappearing, traffic must be confined to the portion still intact at any moment. Fleets of fast horse carts could, of course, be used for less ambitious undertakings but mechanical transport is essential for long hauls.
There is, however, another alternative. The excavated material could be stacked on the roadside at both sides of the trench. It is true that this plan would curtail the area available for cultivation to a strip two or three feet in width, but this cannot be avoided without permitting the excavated material to encroach upon the adjoining fields, thus diminishing what is called the agricultural potential. Since this is (for obvious reasons) to be avoided at all costs, it is possible that on a very narrow road, where abnormally deep excavation would be called for, the excavated material would have to be erected in the nature of a wall on each side of the trench, and the trench would only be of diminutive lateral dimension—possibly as little as six inches. These crude rubble walls would, of course, obstruct sunlight and even rain, and to that extent growth in the trench-bed would be retarded. Moreover, where excavation had to be brought in such a trench to a depth of four or five feet, the side-walls would be a corresponding height above ground level, so that the wheat, even if it attained normal height, would be about three feet below the level of the walls. In a trench six inches wide it would be impossible to save such wheat unless special machinery could be devised for the purpose. Whether such machinery could be devised and economically manufactured and marketed would depend on the number of very narrow wheat trenches in the country having high side-walls.
All these considerations must be weighed by every thoughtful Irishman.
IT ONLY OCCURRED to me the other day that I will have biographers. Probably Hone will do me first and then there will be all sorts of English persons writing books ‘interpreting’ me, describing the beautiful women who influenced my ‘life’, trying to put my work in its true and prominent place against the general background of mankind, and no doubt seeking to romanticise what is essentially an austere and chastened character, saddened as it has been by the contemplation of human folly.
One moment. Where is Con? Con! Here he is. Con, do you like sole bonne femme? A very stylish dish. Con, fashion is good for the sole.
Here is my confession, which I address to Hone. Call it a solemn warning if you like. Believe nothing that you see in my cheque-book stubs. The entries therein might well have been made by that historic protolouse, the father of lice. Let me confess. At the beginning of the month when I get my wages from across the way —→ (often paid by mistake in mysterious Russian and Tunisian currencies, frightful row every now and again trying to get Caffey to change them into humble Irish uncomplicated agricultural notes) I naturally put five pounds in my pocket (not my mouth) and stick the remaining £145 into the bank. A day passes. On the evening of the second day I am in the usual place giving out about the Labour Party; I have ordered 4 at elevenpence each, two at sixpence halfpenny plus eightpence halfpenny for ten cigarettes slipped in under my coat-tails and to my surprise I find I have no money to meet this commonplace mercantile obligation. Out comes the cheque-book and a docket is written out for five pounds. Do I enter ‘Self, £5’ in the stub? I certainly do not.
I am ashamed to do that because these payments to myself are so embarrassingly frequent. I have no desire to have Hone making me out as a sore hedonist. Hence the appearance in my life of a mysterious character called Hickey. I always write ‘Hickey, £5’ or ‘Hickey, £6’, or ‘Hickey, £3’ whatever it may be. I have a cheque book stub before me as I write. In the space of a fortnight the following payments are recorded against Hickey: £5, £5, £3, £4, £2, £2. But let me be perfectly honest, let me make of it that immaculate pectoral phenomenon, a clean breast. I have not told all. Apparently my shame in writing ‘Self’ begot a counterfeit secondary shame at the frequency and consecutiveness of these windfalls to Hickey and—pray bear with a weak character in the agony of confession—I notice that between the £4 and the £2 towards the end, there is a payment of £2 to ‘Hodge’. Later on in the book, both Hickey and Hodge get £5 apiece within three days of each other. Later again, Hickey alone benefits to the tune of £2, £2 and £4. So far as I can ascertain, Hodge has received only four cheques totalling £21 10s od in a space of eighteen months but Hickey has received hundreds of pounds.
Consider the ass Hone would have made of himself had I not chosen to make this revelation in the interests of history. Some terrible drama would be invented. Blackmail. ‘It is scarcely to be credited that while engaged in giving masterpiece after masterpiece to the world, the master was in the toils of a blackmailing ruffian called Hickey, who, with a confederate called Hodge, extracted from him practically every penny he earned.’
Or would he insist on Mrs Hickey, a mysterious widow? A sordid entanglement, straightened out eventually with money to make her keep away? Would the public believe in the existence of a woman so rapacious?
But do you mind the cuteness of me.
I HAVE A NEW BOOK in Hands (the name of the family I’m in digs with) and I have been slaving away in connexion with it night after night above in the National Library. (Drop in there some day if you want a laugh—watch many a forthcoming ‘novel’, ‘play’ or ‘biography’ being copied straight out of the nation’s books—and all under the auspices of that handsome soldier, ‘Buck’ Shea!) This book of mine will be all about the Wild Geese, you know the crowd that were concerned with putting absurd counterfeit pennies in the sea, grey wing upon the tide and so on. Of all the men that fled with that quaint letter heading, RESHAYMUS, perhaps none was so glamorous, none so handsome, none so romantic as Brigadier Remus O’Gorman. Though born in Cookstown and a fine broth of a boy, he is sometimes referred to as an Irish Swords-man; this is nonsense, he never set foot in a bona fide in his life. Be that as it may certain it is that here we have perhaps the most successful Wild Goose that ever laid a golden ague. He founded (by marriage) a family that shed that cheap old-fashioned cloth, lustre, on the country of his origin and gave to the country of his adoption a Marquis, two Marshals including a traffic marshal, a King (under the Empire), three Presidents, four Princes (under the second empire) and the imperishable poet and racketeer, excuse me, raconteur, Rémy de Gourmont nach maireann. (Some of the boys were a bit wild—do you remember that reproach to a certain party for the reason that nunc in quadriviis et angiportis glubit magnanimos Remi nepotes?) You must order a copy of this book (all orders will be dealt with not so much in rotation as in strict rotation)—it will be fully documented and will have a handsome appendix presented to me by Barniville in memory of the old days in Cecilia street. The price will be a quid.
One thing you’ll have to make sure about if you’re a father—never permit your son to consort with anybody in the building trade. Take my own boy. I can only conclude that he spends practically all his time in the company of some plasterer because, do you know what it is, that fellow comes home thoroughly plastered every night. Frightful business. And then all this talk about shortage of supplies.
It worries me, I may tell you. I sit at home every night thinking about it and smoking endless cigarettes. If you call to my place any evening after seven I will show you one of them. Quite circular, like a hoop. My endless cigarettes are made specially for me by Carrolls of Dundalk, that hateful centre of everything that spells reaction in the steam world. G.N.R.(I.). Bah! Why not put the whole show into the brackets while they’re at it? G.N.R.(I.) looks like a man lying naked in bed with a hat on him.
And why this (I) at all. One thing that is to be admired about the English is their superb conceit. Thus they call their papers ‘The Times’, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ and so on, scorning to mention their nationality. But our Irish newspapers, railways, natives and stews always bear an explicit statement that they are Irish—as if anybody in any part of the world could be in any doubt about it.
Of course there is no drink can compare with a bottle of stout. It is sui guinnessis. Keats once called a cab and was disgusted to find the beautiful upholstery ruined with milk spilt by some previous reveller who had been going home with it. Instead of crying over the spilt milk, Keats said to the cabman:
‘What’s this? A cabri-au-lait?’
ANY TIME you happen to visit the kingdom of the blind, you will find the one-eyed Manus King.
Excuse me. I have been glancing over an old newspaper and I read that on the 21st May the City Council will meet for the purpose of ‘striking this year’s rat’. This is probably one of these medieval ceremonies, like the one where the Lord Major fires a dart into the Liffey estuary to proclaim the borough’s dominion over the port. Where is this rat caught? What is it struck with and how hard are the blows? It may be the N.S.P.C.A. in me but I think it’s damn silly for a crowd of grown-up men to gather in the City Hall to beat up one defenceless rat, matteradamn what the excuse is. It’s not so much that I’m friendly with rats but I could think of creatures that deserve a hiding far more. I regret we cannot print their names here. We’re afraid of libel but there’s also the difficulty of space remember.
You know that thing of Yeats beginning When you are old, Dan Grey, and full of sleep? Well, I have translated it into rather fine French. Write to me enclosing a damped stressed envelope and I will send you a copy printed on black glazed buckram with a handful of parsley and two hardboiled eggs. My version begins Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle, assise auprès du feu … and ends with this really pukka sob: Cueillez des aujourd’hui les roses de la vie. The thing doesn’t need a frame and can be bent, screwed or nailed just like a piece of steak.
I am also doing a German version, into what mercantile contract?
Upstairs in his empty room
Gaspard plays his violin
And the embarrassed corpses whom
He asks to dance, just grin.
So he calls his sister Cissie
(Whose surname now is Derham)
And asks would she pepulisse
Ter pede terram.
I like to give a domestic tip now and again because I have reason to think that a few ladies read my notes here. A good way to prevent blood from curdling is to make sure that only the purest ingredients are used. Secondly, pour the blood in very slowly, a spoonful at a time, and thin it out with a few drops of vinegar when the mixture threatens to become too turgid.
I think some of our government departments should see about getting themselves more appropriate names. Our military ministry, seeing we are neutral, should be called the Department of the Fence. And surely the Department of Agriculture is a poor title—would it not be better to call it the Department of Yokel Government?
Really, stuff like this should not appear in a respectable newspaper like the Irish Times. It should refuse to print it. Or else change its name to the Irish Mess.
Enough.
IT IS FASHIONABLE for you women to jeer at us men and pretend that we spend our lives in the sheerest self-indulgence without a thought for anybody else. This is quite wrong, as I have reason to know from something that happened the other day. I was approached by two friends who were very worried about a third party, a great friend of us all. This man (a frightfully decent sort) was making a fool of himself. Question of running around with a married woman. There was talk. The whole thing was most unsuitable. My two visitors thought it was up to the three of us to do something. They thought that I knew the erring man best of all and would I think of seeing him and having a talk as between men of the world? I immediately saw that it was my duty to do so. However unpleasant the interview might be—and some men are inclined to resent advice on personal matters—I saw that I owed it to my fellow-man at least to reason with him and to try to make him see that he was transgressing the rules of good conduct. Accordingly I went. I called to my friend’s rooms at 3 p.m. on Sunday and according to my watch it was 3.6 p.m. when I emerged. My other companions, who were nervously waiting for me round the corner, remarked that my face was red. I explained to them what had happened. Yes, it was quite true that he was carrying on with a married woman. He was married to her, of course. Detestable business. We haven’t spoken since.
I was passing the Irish Times office the other day, and, realising how dreadfully dull newspapers are nowadays, I suddenly dived down on all fours and bit a passing dog in the leg. The creature squealed. I immediately went into the Irish Times office and reported the occurrence. Here was genuine news at last, a scoop. But no, they wouldn’t use it. Sorry sir but the public would not be interested sir. Times have changed sir. Very sorry sir. And so forth. I ask you.
I went and hung my head in Shame, that well-known suburb of Canossa.
WAITER, what was in that glass?
Arsenic, sir.
Arsenic. I asked you to bring me absinthe.
I thought you said arsenic. I beg your pardon, sir.
Do you realise what you’ve done, you clumsy fool? I’m dying.
I am extremely sorry, Sir.
I DISTINCTLY SAID ABSINTHE.
I realise that I owe you an apology, sir. I am extremely sorry.
EVERY NOW AND AGAIN my friend Quidnunc down here on my left (your right) sees Fitt (best tailor in Dublin) to make mysteriously incomprehensible and far-from-called-for observations. (I digress to remark that uncalled for drinks are rarely served in Irish dram-shops.) A few weeks ago I caught him saying in that charming high-pitched voice (there is nothing better than one coat of pitch and tar applied evenly with a mop for preserving timbre) the following:
I hope that the church and monastery of San Niccolà, the most interesting buildings in Catania, have survived the recent fighting.
To this I make one unanswerable query: Why?
If you are going to make observations like this on Sicily, why pick on the one thing we know to be a piece of unthinkable theatrical shoddy, so ruthlessly ‘re-built’ in the last century as to be completely unrecognisable, even to those of us who measured it in the sixties. I have the drawings above in a drawer to this day together with a prayer book belonging to Father Johnson and a silver calipers once the property of Cooley R.I.P.
Look at me, I hope that nothing happens to the temple of Zeus at Agrigento, to temples ‘C’ and ‘D’ at Selinus, to that long pseudo-peripteral hexastyle agglomeration of architectures at Segesta, comprising the styles often centuries on one site, and presenting, through century-slow fragmentation, the artistic erasures of Time, which is cunningly enough removing the more recent, leaving the oldest to the last. I know a fair amount about this subject but do not shout about it, unlike a certain other person.
Look at me again. I have a passion for the Moslem work that was there before the Normans came and which Roger and the bishops he brought with him from Provence were broadminded enough to admire. (I knew the Guiscards well—all excepting the brother of Pope Urban.) Yet do I talk of all this?
I hope to heavens nothing happens to the Church of the Martorana that the Admiral George of Antioch built in 1143 (not 1144 as Brehier so wrong-headedly suggests). And I have a great graw for the Capella Palatine: very special stuff, Latin plan, structure frightfully Greek and the nave plasthered with Byzantine mosaics. And then those incredibly Moslem road-houses (you know—Favara, Menani (Roger II) La Ziza (William I) and La Cuba (William II)! What one finds in Sicily is … well … Europe … but is there ever a word out of me about that? Do you find me … parading my knowledge? I think not.
Cefalu, Vespri, Palermo, Monreale, that squat timber-roofed tub—if it weren’t for the plan, you’d say pre-Norman. And those very quarelooking gadrooned voussoirs, which really must be Islamic in origin—after all, the earliest example of them is in Bab el Futtuh, Cairo 1087, as every one knows. And those interesting intersecting arcades that give the effect of fourteenth-century English window tracery … they at least are Norman in origin, as is the chevron ornament that we find even in Ireland and sometimes on the sleeve of me son’s coat that’s in the Army.
I hope nothing happens to the Municipio and the Cathedral in Syracuse (some relatives of mine are buried within the walls)—as nice a pair of late Renaissance essays as you could hope to find. I make nothing of this, nor do I shout of my predilections in the newspapers, much as less talented persons might be gently suborned to my lordly standards of taste. If there is one thing I would warn you against it is the baroque style. There you have something that lacks the sternness and strength of truly virtuous and admirable work. It is effeminate—I would sooner have Philipstown. (I hope nothing happens to Philipstown.)
I read with bitter amusement that the ‘scandal’ of Dublin’s basement dwellings will be raised at the June meeting of the Corporation. This may impress some people, but to me it simply means that the City Vat-Herrs are too fat, too sybaritic, to attempt the climb to the top floor. It is not that basements are luxurious; but compare for one moment, I pray you, the essentially warm situation of the couple in the kitchen with the plight of the widowed lady on the upmost storey. She lives alone with five mahogany sideboards, four beds, an inlaid escritoire, and two upright pianos. Every day she scrubs the stairs from attic to cellar, and do not forget that the only accessible water tap is in the yard, and that she is seventy-three. The gas rationing does not affect her, it is true, since she has nothing to cook; but she does feel it would be nice to use the only bath for some purpose other than collecting rain water, which comes in through the ‘roof’, owing to the absence of slates. She does not wish to complain, but though twelve of her children are happily married in Cleveland (Ohio) she does not forget that thirteen others slipped through the rotting floorboards in infancy, and had to be waked in the two-pair back. She feels that if the floor were repaired life would be rather marvellous. She has some bitter words for the Government but feels that, all things considered, Mr Asquith is doing his best. She was born in Dublin, but sometimes would as soon say it’s from Injeh she is.
YESTERDAY I marched into the polling booth, happy that the decent Government had permitted me to take part in the complex quinquennial gestation that culminates in an expression of The People’s Will. As usual, everybody looked as if they (yes, I know that ‘they’ is wrong there) were engaged in some criminal conspiracy. Shifty looks, muttering mechanical smiles. Women trying to look as if they had the remotest idea of the meaning of Irish politics. Youngsters of twenty-one coming in with a face that was intended to mean ‘I suppose I’ll have to vote but God be with the days of me dead chief, Parnell.’ A general air of deceit and pretence, though I’m not sure that there is any difference between those two words. In the corner, a man that looked very like a member of the crew known as ‘all right-thinking Irishmen’ carefully reading a bound volume of Irish Times leading articles in order to find out for whom he should vote ‘unless the country is to embark upon another decade of recriminations based upon a civil war that was fought at a time when a large body of the electorate was not even born’. (Needless to say, I dissent from the view that what took place before a man was born can be of no interest to him. I can think of a number of ante-natal occurrences that should be of some interest to every right-thinking Irishman: a certain wedding, for instance; or the steps taken in 1914–18 which ended all war forever, the foundation of the G.A.A., the emigration of Bernard Shaw, even my own fight in the eighties for the use of the ‘full regulator’ in Irish railway practice.)
In the polling booth also I saw evidence of that dreadful pest, the man who is anxious to give the impression that he is personating himself. I will not say that he tries to look like a suspicious character, for the sole reason that I try to write decent English and I will not permit myself (for one moment) to say ‘suspicious character’ if I mean a character who is not suspicious but whose behaviour provokes suspicions on the part of others. This man manages to sidle into the booth, avoids everybody’s eyes, starts searching his pockets and makes no attempt to vote. He is ultimately asked for his name and stammers a name out after some hesitation. No, he cannot find his card. He does not know his number. The agents immediately challenge him. A Guard hovers in the background (using the patent wings devised by my Research Bureau.) Then me dacent man changes his tune, establishes his identity with devastating precision, causes a number of bystanders to identify him, casts his vote (instead of voting) and walks out leaving a very discomfited parcel of officials behind him, all wondering if they will receive solicitors’ letters the next morning. A very bad low Irish type.
Leaving the booth myself, I realised that I had once again spoilt my vote by marking Xs opposite the names I had decided to honour. I had also, of course, inserted the usual comic verse but that alone does not invalidate a voting paper. I walked home wondering why all illiterates use the complex symbol X when they put pen to pay up her. Are we wrong in assuming that a stroke or straight line is the simplest and most primitive literary symbol? Is it in fact more recondite and difficult than the X? Or has the X a mystical import for humans, a quality that transcends all considerations of intellect? Naturally, I do not care a thraneen which it is, it is only a self-conscious peasant like myself would raise such issues in a respectable newspaper.
I am glad it is over but for my part I will not celebrate when me man is returned. I am off the bier, as the corpse said when the drunken motorist crashed into the funeral.
I FOUND MYSELF going homewards the other evening, not in a cab but in that odd mobile apartment with the dun-coloured wall-paper, a brown study. Long long thoughts occupied my mind. I was examining myself according to occult criteria which substitute for ‘time’, ‘death’ and other gaffes of the frail human intellect that blinding instant of vision which simultaneously begins, explains and closes all. Such insights as I have been vouchsafed give warning that all of us will encounter serious trouble in due time, for the upper limits of our aerial ‘existences’ bristle with complexities. Your politician will assure you that the post-war world is the great problem that looms ahead, but those of us who do not spend all our time in this universe well know that the real problem will be the post-world war.
Yet going home that evening I was remembering my small self, thinking of all that had happened through the years, re-examining the mélange of achievement and disillusion that I call my life. Praise I have received, blame also: yet how vain are both, how easy of purchase in the mart of men! I feel that one thing at least stands forever to my credit in the golden ledgers—the rather generous provision I made for the widow Manity and her children when her husband—my best friend—died after a long and painful illness. Poor suffering Hugh Manity, I kept the promise I made to him on his death bed.
When I reached home I was in an odd mood. I felt … old. Age and achievement hath like brandy a mellowness yet withal a certain languor. My daughter was in the next room humming and putting on her hat. I called her.
‘Hullo, Bella. Sit down for a moment, will you.’
‘Yes, Daddy. What’s the matter?’
A long watery stare out of the window. The pipe is produced and fiddled with.
‘Bella … how old are you?’
‘Nineteen, daddy. Why?’
Another frightful pause.
‘Bella, we’ve known each other for a long time. Nineteen years. I remember you when you were very small. You were a good child.’
‘Yes, daddy.’
More embarrassment.
‘Bella … I have been a good daddy to you, haven’t I? At least I have tried to be.’
‘You are the best daddy in the world. What are you trying to tell me?’
‘Bella … I want to say something to you. I’m … I’m going to give you a surprise. Bella … please don’t think ill of me but … but … but, Bella—’
With a choking noise she has jumped up and has her arms about me.
‘O daddy, I know, I know! I know what you are going to say! You … you’re not my daddy at all. You found me one day … when I was very small … when I was a tiny baby … and you took me home … and cared for me … and watched over me … and now you find you have been in love with me all these years …’
With a scream I was on my feet. Soon I was racing down the street to the local cinema, clutching in my inside pocket the old-fashioned Mauser, a present from Hamar Greenwood for doing a few jobs for him at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular. I reached the cinema and demanded to see the manager. Soon the suave pink-jowled ruffian appeared and invited me into his private office. Very shortly afterwards two shots rang out and I sincerely hope I will be given an opportunity of explaining to the jury that I had merely wished to suggest to my daughter that as a father of a family who had worked and scraped for years to keep other people in luxury, it was about time I should be relieved of the humiliation of having to press my own trousers.
DO YOU KNOW it frightens me sometimes when I look at the date. 1943, eh! Getting on, not getting any younger and no use trying to disguise it. The ears, like grate-black coxswains! I was sauntering down Molesworth street the other day (nothing will do me but try to fix up a merger between that crowd and the Knights, there are difficulties in the way but I am making some progress) and suddenly I found myself looking at the old Molesworth Hall. Will you ever forget the night we did Broken Soil, that thing of Colum’s? Do you realise that was neither today nor yesterday? The Fays were in their element that time, Frank as the Wise Man in The Hour Glass and Willie as the Beggarman in A Pot of Broth. And the best fun of all was myself and Starkey as the pupils—I have to laugh when I think of how near we went to making a hames of the whole thing. And Mary scolding the two of us how lovely she looked. I still say it was Joe Hone’s fault standing there in the wings making faces at us.
I encountered all the undermentioned expressions (in the course of) last week. Indicate (in your own words, whatever that means) what is wrong with each.
1. An auctioneer’s poster which advertises the disposal of a number of things, including a library of books.
2. ‘I bought a new pair of shoes today and they are cutting the feet off me.’
3. ‘I was down seeing my tailor about a suit of clothes.’
4. ‘The jury returned a verdict of wilful murder.’
You will find the answers lower down in this interesting article.
In this newspaper recently I noticed a big headline (footlines are prohibited by special orders of the Editor) ESCAPEE GETS JAIL FOR LIFE. One sighs, of course—I mean, surely this man was (if anything) an escaper. The escapee was either the governor of the jail or the State. But I like the scene which takes place in the governor’s simply furnished office when me man is caught and brought back again, looking rather foolish and abashed. Present is Mr Kevin Dixon, Attorney General. A blazing mess of wax in the corner indicates that lackeys are sealing an important document. Soon the little ceremony is over and me man is on his way back to the cells, the possessor for life of all that and those Portlaoise Prison with a row of twenty-seven strongly-constructed cottages let to solvent warders, fruit and vegetable gardens, handball-alley, death-chamber, hot linen press, maid’s bedroom, garage accommodation for 59 motor cars, well-kept apiary, the whole in perfect working order a unique opportunity for investors. (And all this, mind you, notwithstanding the fact that it is illegal to alienate State property.)
1. ‘Of books’ is superfluous. It is not usual to refer to collections of bananas, goldfinches, colza-oil bottles or sewer men’s dungarees as ‘libraries’ of those articles.
2. New shoes do not usually have a restrictive effect on the throat, groin or shoulders but only on the feet. The feet need not therefore be specified.
3. Tailors make suits only of clothes and will not, save in the rarest cases, agree to make suits of ratskin, cocoa-beans or decayed vegetable matter.
4. Homicide is no murder unless it is wilful.
OLD ETIQUETTE BOOKS and the like are not very funny but my honourable lordship has come across a ‘National Encyclopedia of Business and Social Forms’ published in America in 1882 and assumes that a few extracts from it from time to time will be found diverting. This publication takes the view—quite reasonably—that you are illiterate and gives you the text of your own letters—even your love letters. Naturally, it also gives the replies which you should receive, thus making the whole correspondence rather pointless.
The first example is entitled A Formal Declaration of Love. It is too long and embarrassing to quote but in the middle of it the ardent party says, with pauperish dignity: ‘I am not, as you know, a man of wealth, but my means enable me to marry, and although I cannot promise you the luxury a wealthier man could bestow upon you, I can promise a faithful and enduring love, and a home in which your comfort will be my chief aim.’
Nice, ah? For ‘my means’ read ‘your means’ and possibly you have something nearer the truth. Next comes A Favourable Reply and An Unfavourable Reply, the latter concluding with ‘let me hope that you will find some woman, worthy of you, who will make you the good wife you deserve.’ Then comes A Less Formal Offer.
‘Dear Rosy: On returning from skating yesterday afternoon, and reflecting alone on the pleasant morning we had passed, I was more than ever impressed by my wretched, solitary existence. Will you break for me this monotonous routine of life by saying, “It need not be, Charlie”?
‘I have loved you fondly and long; your parents and mine are intimate friends; they know my private character. Will you accept me as your husband, dearest Rosie? Believe me ever your attached, Charlie.’
Then The Reply:
‘“It need not be, Charlie.” I shall be at home this evening. Rosy.
Rosy was a smart dame. But why did Charlie misspell her name?
The next letter relates to A Declaration of Love at First Sight.
‘Dear Miss Logan: Although I have been in your society but once, the impression you have made upon me is so deep and powerful that I cannot forbear writing to you, in defiance of all rules of etiquette …’
Mark this villainy—the etiquette of violating etiquette!
‘Affection is sometimes of slow growth; but sometimes it springs up in a moment. In half an hour after I was introduced to you my heart was no longer my own. I have not the assurance to suppose that I have been fortunate enough to create any interest in yours; but will you allow me to cultivate your acquaintance in the hope of being able to win your regard in the course of time? Petitioning for a few lines in reply, I remain, dear Miss Logan, yours devotedly, W—P—.’
Now comes the supreme refrigeration—An Unfavourable Reply:
‘Sir: Your note has surprised me. Considering that you were, until last evening, an entire stranger to me, and that the few words which passed between us were on common-place subjects, it might be called impertinent. But I endeavour to view it in a more favourable light, and am willing to attribute your extraordinary and sudden professions of devotion to ignorance of the usages of society. You will oblige me by not repeating the absurdity, and I think it best that this note should close the correspondence and our acquaintance. By attending to this request, you will oblige, Your obedient servant, Susan L—.’
Here the system broke down completely, for there is no Forceful Reply to the Foregoing, such as would give Walter an alternative to immediate emigration.
I could write Miss Logan a pretty fine one myself but as the lady must now be 86 (if she’s a day), I will spare her my scorpious tongue.
Here is another model letter from my 1882 American ‘National Encyclopedia of Business and Social Forms’, being From a Son, who has Misconducted himself towards his Employer, to his Father.
‘Dear Father—I am in such distress I scarcely know how to commence my letter. Without the least reason, without the least provocation, I left my employer at the most busy season, just for a temporary trifling amusement. He—the best of employers—for the moment was forgotten by me; self predominated. I ran away from my place, and here I find myself disgraced and miserable, and grieve to think how indescribably shocked you will be when Mr Evans communicates with you relative to my absence.
‘However, dear father, there is one consolation: I cannot be accused of dishonesty; so I hope my character is not irretrievably ruined.
‘Will you see my employer, and tell him how deeply I regret my fault, and entreat him to forgive it, and allow me to return to my place? It shall hereafter be my constant study to perform my duty in the most upright manner, and with the most assiduous attention. Let me hear also, dear father, sending me Mr Evans’ reply, that you also forgive Your erring and repentant son, John Thompson.’
FUNNY THING happened the other day. A young friend of mine (I think he is my son as a matter of fact, though we haven’t spoken for years) was found ‘guilty’ following some quaint ritual in that well-known Carpathian hamlet, Kamara. My son is highly educated and has long lost his taste for (those sort of) parlour games, and throughout the proceedings he leant contemptuously on the back wall of the corps, Tauss, pardon me, courthouse. But when the proceedings were over he got a frightful shock. He was put back. There he was leaning against a twofootsix masonry wall in coursed random rubble and begob before he knew what was going on he was put back. He tells me (sign language, of course—we haven’t spoken for years) that no one except the man who has been (personally) put back through a stone wall by twelve respectable pushing, sweating, cursing pious Irishmen (with the Law behind them) can understand the humiliation of this. He says his ribs are full of mortar yet, he says there are skewbacks under his oxters and a big kneeler at the base of his skull, there’s a bondstone still stuffed into the small of his back and his heels are full of external plinth. He says he wouldn’t go through it again and I am with him there—once is enough to go through a wall.
D.O. Fogg was in the case.
RESOLVE IN FUTURE to peruse the daily papers thoroughly, particularly the editorial which is always full of current interest, and when you have this course in topical education completed, there will be at least one subject on which HE will be able to say you can ‘talk intelligently’.—Woman’s Life.
It astonishes me that anybody should be so anxious to get married as to go over there ——→* and get a lift on the crossbar in the daily cycle journeys between Kharkov, Bryansk and Orel. And surely the result of such a course would be formidable.
Hello, Jack. There is certainly something brewing on the Orel sector.
Yes dear. Time alone will tell.
Jack, it would not surprise me at all if we were to see a new pincer thrust next week with Kharkov as the nodal point, one claw turning southward through the Donbas to the Dnieper valley.
I agree.
Because, Jack, it is known that the Russians have vast masses of men and material concentrated in that sector.
(What’s up with this unfortunate woman?) Yes, dear.
And Jack … Do you know the firing power of the new Mark III tank?
‘Again, do not ignore the classics as something which bored you to tears in schooldays. Read them again now, when your mind is more cultured and better able to appreciate them, and you will find that they are “surprisingly” fascinating.’
I know. A little of the Oracula Sibyllina, Polyzelus, Lycurgus Orator, a peep into Dioscorides’ colourful tracts on physics, Homer, Horace, Virgil, and a very small pinch of Ovid. To describe all this as ‘surprisingly fascinating’ is to toy with words. And the young lady will get a drop when she first mentions the classics to her young man and hears him straightway deliver a discourse on the plans of Hartigan, Butters and Jarvis and how the books were a better proposition than the tote at the last Junction meeting.
It’s many a man they ruined the same horses.
I SEEN that thing at the Abbey—
‘My Dear Father.’
Was it any good?
Very well done and well acted but that’s all that was in it.
I see.
You couldn’t get a laugh out of it.
I haven’t been inside that place for two year.
I seen meself sittin there for 2 hours and I couldn’t get a laugh out of it anywhere. You like a bit of humour do you know.
I haven’t put me head in there since before the war.
It was heavy stuff about clergymen do you know. There’s not a laugh anywhere in it. The wife was with me. The best thing I ever seen there was ‘Professor Tim’. But this other stuff wasn’t much good. One thing I couldn’t get a laugh there anywhere.
I’ll tell you what my dish is.
Another thing I seen there was Double Trouble be Laurel and Hardy.
I’ll tell you what I like. Maritana.
Them’s a very mad pair, Laurel and Hardy.
Maritana and the Yeoman of the Guard. You know the one with Jack Point. I-polished-up-the-knocker-of-the-king’s-front-door.
The fat lad is a terrible madman. Another time the pair was for bringin a piana up a long stairs.
And-now-I’m-the-ruler-of-the-king’s-navee.
Your men got stuck. Your man Hardy is above pullin an sweatin and the thin lad below. Wan was pushing the piana down and the other pushin it up. Begob I nearly passed out laughin. You’d hear the roars of me a mile off. I’d go anywhere for a laugh.
Th’Abbey has new rules out about smokin, Jack was tellin me.
I remember long years ago a Saturday never passed that I wasn’t in d’Abbey. There used to be great laughs there in years gone by.
Did you ever see ‘Savings Bank’ written over the door high up?
That was the old Mechanics Institute, many a time I heard the old man talking about it, workin with blow-lamps there and playin billiards. That was before the Free State.
I tell you what—there’s a very queer class of a play put on there now. The sister Annie put on a show there for the orphanage in 1924. There was a lot of lads there with bagpipes.
Well I didn’t fancy that ‘Father’ play. No laughs bar one where a fella slipped goin out of a door. He nearly creased himself. Of course the actors there is very good. There’s men there that was over in America.
The sister put on a great play with step-dancers and bagpipes, real Irish stuff. Jack had bottles of stout for the band inside in the pay-box.
Some of the actors was across doin ‘Professor Tim’ at the World’s Fair. All the Irish in America was crowdin in. Take out the green flag over there and you’re right. Your men were flyin about in special trains. There was wan particular actor that passed out in the middle of a play.
The sister was very strict about that. She asks Jack what’s all the men doin in the pay-office. This is back in ‘24. Checkin the money for the Revenue, says Jack, fixin up the entertainment tax.
Jack was the boy.
One of the bagpipe lads was found mouldy in Marlboro’ St the next mornin, kilts an’ all lyin up against a railins.
You could get a good laugh in them days. But that thing the other night there was no laugh anywhere in it bar the wan. I seen meself yawnin in the middle of it.
D’Abbey’s gone to hell this ten year.
I didn’t get a laugh anywhere bar the wanst.
An’ it’ll be worse before it’s better.
I never seen a play that it was so hard to get a laugh out of. That’s wan thing I do like—a good laugh. I’ll go anywhere for a good laugh. And that’s the truth. A good laugh.
I LEARNED from a recent news item that my best friend, Mr E. J. Moeran, is ‘going to Kerry to write a concerto for ‘cello and orchestra …’
Well, all I can say is this: it would not be my way, it would not be my way at all and more I will not say. With me, you see, music is an obsession, not a profession. When the feeling for … creation … suddenly wells up in me … like … the sea … I become—it is fascinating—I become completely passive, the activated rather than the actor … and that is why I can be so devastatingly humble about my best oeuvres—I become the vessel, the medium through which something … call it what you will but of this world it is not … expresses itself. I become almost … female. What is it Goethe says? ‘Art is the Mediatrix of the Unspeakable.’ How true that is! The … horrible, really horrible thing is, though, that … for the artist … art is a humiliation. When one is a genius, one keeps remembering that one’s great gifts entail the most frightening responsibilities … one is … one is simply not as other men. My God the agony of it all, there have been nights when I have nearly gone mad. Mad, do you hear me. But to say quite calmly I am going to write for instance a concerto for Klavier and Orch … No, that would be impossible, quite completely out of the question. For I, you see, I, simply … never know when this … this … thing happens to me, I simply never know what the result will be. It may, for instance, be a colossal Kunstfilm in which the statement of overtonal montage is taken yet a step further in the higher reaches of a rather Russian hierarchy of the spatio-temporal values relating to the metric of colour in the visual-acoustic ‘world’—it may be a completely épatant experiment in the grisaille where the contrapuntal possibilities of the tone texture, form and content are balanced against the searing harmonics of sensibility i.e., ‘feeling’ in the sense of europäischer Geist. It may be a poem in which withering humanity, seen in the heartbreaking immediacy of sense-experience, takes on the sweetly occidental aspect of a dying god, terrible yet tender and somehow immaculate. It may be a ‘novel’ so vast in scope, so perfect in execution, so overwhelming in conception, so sited in unheard-of dimensions that … no responsible publisher could risk bringing it before the world. It may be a monumental Minority Report on Some Aspects of the Housing Problem in Europe and the Middle East, with special reference to Occidental Sewage Disposal Its Rise and Fall. It may yet be detailed drawings and specifications for a new locomotive, it may be a modest proposal for the recodification of our somewhat hare-brehon laws, it may be a play so grandiose that the side wall of the theatre has to be torn down to get the scenery in … or again … it may be a … symphony (in Remineur) dedicated to the People of Ireland; all written so that it can be played on the Perry fiddles now in the National Museum and on no others. It may be a new brand of porter which can intoxicate but not inebriate. A new elastic guaranteed not to stretch. Grandiose plans for a new National University. A device for buying county councillors. A forte piano. A sacred weapon. An aeroplane suitable for use on land. A pan-knife. An entirely new type of District Justice that hears evidence, announces a decision and says absolutely nothing else. A machine for rinsing out old stomachs. A plan for repatriating Sudetenland Corkmen. In fact, I mean … anything, absolutely anything.
And if you ask me what I am doing now, I reply that I do not know, I only work here.
ANY READER who feels he or she would like to meet myself and family should write to the Editor asking for particulars as to when I am at home, the best time to call, and whether it is necessary to leave cards beforehand. You will find us, I fear, just a little bit formal. My wife, for instance, keeps her hands in a hand-bag. This, however, need not disturb you. Again, if it happens that you come to dinner, you must be prepared for certain old-world customs—out-moded if you like, but still capable of imparting grace and charm to a gathering of those who knew the vanished world of yesteryear. First a glass of pale sherry, exquisite in its thin needle-like impact on the palate, potent of preprandial salivation. Then fine-tasted bouillon in china bowls, served with white rolls, those clandestinely-sieved American cigarettes. My jewelled hand has now strayed to the Turkish bell-tassel and the great triple peal that calls for the dinner proper rings out in the distant servants’ hall. This is where the guest who is accustomed to the rougher usage of today may receive a slight surprise. When the dinner is brought in, he will note that it is … well … in a dinner jacket. Big mass of roast beef in the breast, sleeves stuffed with spuds, sprigs of celery up through the button-holes, gravy sopping out everywhere. A bit formal if you like, but if one does not observe the punctilious regimen of good behaviour, one is, after all, very little better than the beast of the field. Indeed, remembering the execrable manners of a colleague of mine in this great newspaper organisation, I had almost said that one is very little better than the beast of The Field.
When the coffee stage is reached, nothing will do my eccentric wife but have it accompanied by an odd confection of her own invention—longbread.
The Irish Times has been full of grand news these days. ‘The Maoris,’ I read ‘are sometimes called “the brown Irish” because they are always smiling and happy.’ Fancy! New Zealand I do not know, but strange that it should be the seat of so monstrous a sarcasm. I know that we are morose, crypt-faced, inclined to the view that life is a serious disorder which ultimately proves fatal. But why should these antipodean britishers see fit to send this sneer to us three thousand miles across the sea in the middle of a world war?
Then I read that ‘future Croke Park matches may see extremely large numbers of police on duty’. Hmm.
Could the rules not be changed to provide that in every large match at least one of the teams shall be composed entirely of policemen? Alternatively, could not all teams playing there be bound to the peace before they take the field and thus be liable for a stiff jail sentence if they commit assaults on the referee or each other?
Here is another extraordinary news item: ‘A pig feeder may slaughter a sick animal, cure it and get a top price. In fact the pig may die and, as an afterthought, be cured.’
There you get, very nicely put, the distinction between a corpse and a carcase.
I RARELY OFFER my readers a handsome book prize, chiefly because handsome books one dares not dream of parting with; nevertheless, a handsome copy in calf of my own treatise on ‘Cockburn’s Geared Turbine’ I will gladly send to the first reader who sends me the context of the poem in which this rather pidgin phrase occurs:
‘… his Laodamia it comes.’
Absolutely no chorus pawn dents can be entered into, nor will proof of postage be accepted as proof of delivery. Onus of proof is on plaintiff, though it is not contended that this dictum can operate to suspend the rule of law. In Rex v. Beachborough Sea Fisheries Corporation it was contended that defendants were estopped from salvage by trover by reason of non-user of certain jetties, landing stages, slips, causeways, salting-sheds and brine-tubs formerly held under licence from a board not being a harbour board, a board of trustees constituted for the purposes of inland navigation, or a board charged with conserving maritime fisheries: held by Palles C.B. that there had been suspensory user in fructu and that no escheat or reversionary lapse subsisted by mere reason of effluxion of time, time not being of the essence of the contract, and that the charging order set forth in the third schedule of the Order in Council was properly charged. He quashed the conviction and allowed all parties their costs out of the estate. Continuing, the Chief Baron said:
‘Not only must justice be done but it must be seen to be done. It is immediately plain that the Antrim County Council, being a road authority within the meaning of the Grand Jury Acts, the Local Government (Ireland) Act, 1898 (read with the Application of Enactments Order 1898), is not statutorily charged with the maintenance of sea-lanes. Plaintiffs therefore must fail.’
Eh? What am I saying?
Sorry—I pressed the wrong button. It was poetry I meant to talk about.
I often wonder am I … mad? Do I take that rather Irish thing, O’Fence, too easily? I go into a house, for instance. My ‘host’ says ‘sit down’. Now why down? Why must he be so cautious and explicit. Is there not a clear suggestion there that if he had neglected to be precise, he might turn round to find me seated on top of the bookcase, the head bent to avoid the ceiling and the air thick with fractured cobwebs? How equally stupid the phrase ‘stand up!’ And how mysterious the sit-down fight as opposed to the stand-up fight!
I would like to direct the attention of educated persons to this remarkably elegant little quatrain—a certain Ó Maolchiaráin reproaches parties allegedly responsible for wiping off his son;
A lucht do mharbh an ngéig nglain is do leig fá’n arm a fhuil,
níor cháin an fear, níor aor ibh, níor libh a thaobh geal do ghuin.
Apart from the frank implication that a lampoon is recognised as fair grounds for murder, note that the verse, though unpolluted by dissyllables, is dignified and unmonotonous.
The book prize offer above is withdrawn. Too many shrewd Schs. and Mods. and junior ads. in this country, I fear. You guessed the context at once, of course.
It comes; et iuvenis quondam,
nunc femina, Caeneus …
But I will re-offer the prize to the reader who can tell me when the emergency will terminate.
THE ROYAL IRISH Academy of the Post War World (President Sir Myles na gCopaleen (the da)) is making arrangements for turning this country into a limited liability company. Every person who is an existing ‘Irish national’ will automatically become a shareholder unless he formally opts to be ‘an excepted person’ within the meaning of Section 10 (b) of the Eire (Incorporation) Act, upon which the draughtsmen are working night and day. The Act will set up a Board which will take over the country as a going concern together with all proprietary messauges, easements, hereditaments and choses in action. Section 104, subsection 3 (iv) will provide for the holding of an annual meeting at which the audited accounts of the undertaking will be considered and at which every shareholder, hereinafter referred to as ‘the Irishman’, will be entitled to attend and be haired. The members of the board will be ‘elected’ according to certain mysterious formulae contained in Schedule II of the Act. There will be power to declare a dividend, issue debentures and underwrite industrial risks in other countries. Under Part III of the Act, all persons offering themselves for election to the Board automatically become ‘excepted persons’ within the meaning of Section 10 (b) and henceforth will be deemed to be ‘Irishmen’ only if and when elected. On retiring, a member of the Board is de-nationalised but is eligible for re-election to the Irish nation. All very complicated and technical but there you are.
Myself? Where do I come in? I don’t quite know but if I am elected to the Board, I can foresee a time when I will have to write certain letters. One, for instance, to the Chairman of the Board (probably J. J. O’Leary) and thus to the head of the State:
‘Dear Chairman—I write to tender with great regret my resignation from the Irish people. I am compelled to take this step for personal reasons and trust yourself and your co-directors will see your way to accept it. Thanking you for past courtesies, M.’
‘Dear M—The Board and I have considered the contents of your letter and are unanimous in expressing the hope that you will find it possible to reconsider your decision and agree to remain a member of the Irish nation. The Board wish me to stress the importance they attach to maintaining Irish personnel intact in the present serious state of the world.—J. J.’
I cannot agree, of course.
‘Dear Chairman—I thank you for your letter but I regret very much that owing to advancing age and failing health, I find it almost impossible to fulfil the manifold duties attaching to the position of Irishman and feel that I should make way for younger men. I am indeed sorry that I cannot meet the wishes of your Board. M.’
But they come back.
‘Dear M—While profoundly appreciating the reasons which have led you to tender your resignation, the Board would again warmly counsel you to remain in office for at least a year longer, so that the nation may have the benefit of your advice and guidance in these critical times.—J. J.’
Again I reply:
‘Dear Chairman—I have consulted my physician regarding the request contained in your last letter. He has absolutely prohibited the use of alcohol and also stated that he will disclaim all responsibility for my health if I start fighting. Your Board will therefore appreciate that I am by reason of physical incapacity entirely unfitted for the post of Irishman and for that reason must again tender my resignation with regret.—M.’
But they won’t take no.
‘Dear M—My Board have very carefully considered your last letter. While they are mindful of your enfeebled physical condition, they are still most reluctant to accept your resignation and they have asked me to inquire whether you would be prepared to continue as an Irishman in a part-time capacity.—J.J.’
There you are. A part-time Irishman! What an end to a life of patriotic endeavour!
My present hope is that we will be able to get a new section in the Bill providing for persons to retire from the post of Irishman on pension. And they will have to be pretty generous pensions (at that).
MOST OF MY READERS will recognise the importance of planning. One hears the word mentioned on every side. How good, then, to learn that Sir Myles na gCopaleen (the da) has formed what he is pleased to call the Royal Irish Academy of the Post War World. I defy anybody to exaggerate the importance of this move. It is a move vastly portentous, imponderable and marvellous, its mystical kernel an intellectual epigenesis. Quaternions with cubed vectors are used in the formula, which cannot be evaluated without the use of eighteen differential algebras. The Snodgrass Cycle has been availed of repeatedly in the preliminary calculations. It is all frightfully intricate and subsists intrinsically in a hitherto unsuspected plane of demophysics quite impossible to describe according to the accepted means of communication. Expressed symbolically in its lowest terms, the concept is as follows: a + b + c - j = a. Sir Myles (the da), out for a walk, felt the galvanic circuit close and this almost monstrous essay in socio-thaumaturgics is the result. He reached the nearest canal bridge at a run.
One must try, however, to be a little more explicit, even at the risk of misleading. In a word, it is hoped to produce, after an ‘interval’ of five Planned Years, a Planned Man. This process will be cyclic and Men more and more thoroughly Planned will emerge after each quinquennial gestation. The Planned Man, being himself planned, will occupy his planned brain with plans and planning and will breed children so planned that they will not tolerate anything whatever that is unplanned, half-planned or misplanned. Plan-less occurrences like a shower of rain will be discontinued. Death itself will no longer be the desultory, unpredictable and unsatisfactory phenomenon it has been for so long in this country (notwithstanding the vaunted promises of the Fianna Fáil government) but will be planned and re-planned until an all-party agreed measure can be introduced in the Dáil entitled—with planned irony—the Life (Transitory Provisions) Bill.
All this will not happen in a day. The Royal Irish Academy of the Post War World will have associated with it countless subsidiary planning organisations. The Highways Planning Board will arrange for vast concrete arterial roads to radiate from every centre of population, each road having special lanes for fast traffic, slow traffic, tramways, cycles, pedestrians, invalids, readers of The Standard, school-children and Irish speakers. At intervals of two miles there will be rest centres, health clinics, a ‘People’s Unit’ embracing swimming pools, restaurant, cinema, writing and reading rooms, gramophone recital apartments, a home for the aged, a vitamin bureau and two aerodromes.
Meanwhile the National Housing Planning Board will be engaged in erecting ten million vast arterial houses for the Planned People of Ireland, each house complete with steriliser and small operating theatre, a miniature pharmacy for a new planned science of autotherapy, built-in wife, and hot-water on draught from the system already provided by An Cólucht Náisiúnta um Uisce Galach, or the National Hot Water Corporation. The Board of Transportation and Communications will lay out and build vast arterial railroads and canals, the railroads traversing only worthless mountain land and being enabled to overcome the unthinkable grades by means of locks. Vast arterial tree plantations will be undertaken by the National Afforestation Trust. Vast arterial hydro-electric, sewerage, waterwork, and mining enterprises will be carried out by direct labour under the auspices and aegis of the National Development Board. A Coal Exploration Company will be charged with the sole take of finding vast arterial coal in this country, and another Company (The National Coal Mining Corporation) will undertake the work of mining it.
That is but an inkling. Further information I must and will give. But surely what I have said is something to be going on with.
WHAT BETTER to do this morning than to wish Saul my raiders a Happy Christmas sand a brass pierrot’s New Ear? Particularly Uncle Paul (the paid) and Uncle Peter (the robbed), Tom, Dick and Harry (most plebeian of trinities, mystical triune prosopopoeia of the commonplace), Billy and Jack (the latter tireless welcomer of the former’s ex-friends). Tadhg agus a replica Taidhgin (Mac-rocosm et Mick-rocosm), R. C. Ferguson, Glenavy, Lord Moyne (‘Moyne’s a Guinness’), Willie Norton, Power, O’Keeffe and Fogarty, then Jelly D’Aranyi, Willie Dwyer, Jack Yeats, and, of course, Hernon. Christmas grey things to myself also. I deserve them as much as anybody—as much as the next, in fact—though I never noticed that they done me much good. What is there in all this seasonable time for me? Just a hunk of Manchester corned beef and a cup of ‘coffee’ slammed down at 6 p.m. on top of the boiler drawings by my hired slut. I sigh and take off the glasses. Outside in the snow I hear ‘Good King Wenky’s Loss’ being empiped by a small selfappointed choir of juvenile delinquents. Is a straight steam path possible, I wonder vaguely, if we superheat? After a while I ‘drink’ the ‘coffee’ and go to bed, feeling very ill.
How tired I am after another year of denunciation!
Another year, eh? Nineteen forty-four, whaaa? What does it hold in Store Street for us? Come back this time next year and I will tell you. But this much it is permissible to say even now. The Royal Irish Academy of the Post War World has plans for 1944. Far-reaching and unthinkable dispositions have already been made. Employment will be afforded to both the stay-at-homes and the returned emigrants, videlicet, the U.A. men and the U.S.A. men. The Academy will without stint pour Phil T. Lukor into (a) the construction of a vast new Cinnamon Theatre; (b) a Ciné-Monotony Theatre; (c) an Ignorarium; (d) a Columbarium (for disused Knights); (e) great new block of Outlaw Courts; (f) an ultramodern Disease Centre with hot and cold shivers laid on; (g) same old vast arterial roads radiating throughout the length and breadth of Ireland (despite the fact that vast arterial roads which radiate can only proceed radially and without reference to length of breadth). Finally a Greyhound Painting Academy.
SAY I MAKE a ‘joke’ and it doesn’t appeal to you, you are annoyed rather than amused. Annoyed, simply because you haven’t yet found out how to unlaugh. A rather similar problem confronts my Research Bureau. In the Days of the Brown Bread (Lord, how long ago!) a number of disaffected persons, chiefly women, took to illegal sieving operations behind closed doors. Talk to them as you would, you could not induce them to do it behind open doors. Their point was that brown bread did not ‘agree’ with them and that Willie Nilly (that most reckless person) they must have white. Very well. I did what I could, took the matter up with the Ministers, addressed stern admonitions to the farmers … and now … everybody can have white. But including those who want brown, and with whom white does not ‘agree’. Our problem, then is … how to unsieve the white flour. See what you can do for a change. (Offaly papers please copy.)
But how strange is Nature’s chromatic syntax! The more refined a thing is, the whiter it becomes and if you do not believe this do please come round some evening and have a look at my face.
But pish! Why should one bother with bread ‘problems’ and the like when that vast ganglion of multiple brain-nerves, the Royal Irish Academy of the Post War World, is grappling mightily with the task of solving all human troubles simultaneously—planning, planning, eternally planning a new world reborn.
Take transport. We all know by now that we will be the laughing stock of the civilised world unless immediately after the war we can build vast arterial roads. Very well. We are all properly ashamed of our winding undulating country roads and we know too well that they are completely without Rest Centres, Rhubarb Dosage Stations, Health Clinics, Dental Hospitals, Vitamin Breweries, Youth Centres—any primitive modern amenity you like to name. But how are we to provide proper vast arterial roads immediately if the country is full of hills? One way only. The roads must be built on some existing level thoroughfare. Of such thoroughfares we have only two—the canals and the railways. The Academy has under consideration a plan to divert railway traffic to the canals and build the vast arterial roads on the railway lines, which are ideally deficient in grades and curves. Reynolds and McCann kindly met the Academy to the extent of constructing an experimental stretch near Dublin. Laugh if you like. At present the rails are laid in the bed of the canal and there is plenty of room for trains and barges to pass each other. There is one snag. Rough stretches of water often mean that the engine’s fire is put out and moreover, constant dredging is necessary to keep the rails free of dead dogs and muck. The Academy is now investigating the possibilities of having floating trains propelled with the screws of old liners. The advantage here is that the engines could tow barges as well as the adapted coaches and thus make up for the shortage of rolling—or rather floating stock: The position is very fluid at the moment but you may be sure that when you read that the reconstructed G.S.R. concern will be a transport rather than a railway company, something like what is shown in aur photograph was contemplated. Why else would My Honour be buying G.S.R.?
To come back to bread for a moment, I had an odd experience the other day, met one of my poor relations and asked him how he liked the new white bread. Blank face. Eh, bread? What did I mean bread? White? Hah? Hah? Didn’t understand what I was talking about, never heard of it.
(Damn fellow must eat cake.)
MORE GOOD NEWS! I am in position to announce that the Royal Irish Academy of the Post War World (President, Sir Myles na gCopaleen (the da)) does not intend to dissociate itself from present politico-social trends. Apart from Planning, which is, of course, all-important, the Academy has officially endorsed the new monopolative and amalgamative concept of society. There will be no more laissez faire if certain of the Academy’s plans mature, nor will profit-making be permitted in relation to any public utility.
The Academy has a rather remarkable scheme concerning Dublin transport. On this subject there is much loose thinking. Reflect for a moment and you will realise that intra-city passenger transport is quite unique and has nothing at all in common with any other carrying business such, for example, as the railway line from Dublin to Cork. The latter is a life-line connecting a number of isolated communities and it is chiefly important because it carries goods and food to sustain them. The carriage of humans, while remunerative, is not an essential element in such a company’s affairs; moreover, if isolated individuals insist on travelling long distances, it is right that they should be charged (as undoubtedly they are) an enormous fee for being permitted to indulge this egregious whim. Municipal transport is altogether another matter. The inhabitants of a city survive by perpetual movement within it, darting hither and thither about their occasions like ants on an ant-hill. They may be called the blood of the municipal organism and the public transportation system corresponds to the arteries and veins. The people have no choice but to move. It is therefore unconscionable that they should be treated the same as if they were long-distance travellers who undertake a journey possibly once a year, more often than not for pleasure or at least for a purpose that is not essential for economic survival. It is quite ridiculous that a group of individuals should be permitted to extract money from a community for permitting the community to discharge a function essential to its existence.
But municipal transport conducted by private enterprise is not a servile passive thing, dumbly carrying for a price people wherever they may wish to go. It has a dynamism entirely its own, an influence wholly pernicious in the community’s development. Teeming city slum centres, for example, cannot be cleared because the depressed classes involved could not submit to the tax levied by the company for the privilege of living on the city outskirts. A transport company can crib and stunt a city and its people.
To approach to the solution of this problem one has only to realise that transport is no less necessary than running water, sewerage, or artificial light. These things are ‘free’ which means that they are charged for according to the valuation of property. The services are universal and one can use them as much or as little as one likes. There, then, you have the solution of the municipal transport problem. We must provide a ’bus service that is completely free to all the citizens and maintained out of the Corporation’s revenues. The present system must obviously be changed and a free service would be much better than the only other solution—a flat rate for all journeys. What would the free system mean in terms of money? Why, nothing to scare anybody. The Corporation’s annual income is of the order of £3,500,000, of which some £2,200,000 is raised from rates; the rate being about twenty shillings in the pound, the valuation is also about £2,200,000. In 1943 the Dublin Transport Company collected £1,000,000 approximately in fares. Of this sum, it is safe to assume that £250,000 represents either profit or charges that would not arise if the concern were owned by the municipality. If we assume that it would cost the Corporation £750,000 to provide a similar service, it would mean about 7/6d extra on the rates. Is that too much? Consider an average man who lives in a house of £20 valuation; he has a wife and four school-going children, and he is in a two-penny fare situation. The man spends 8d on fares himself, the children 1/4d and the wife 4d; that is a fair minimum daily expenditure of 2/6d. You add another 6d to take care of all unessential journeys and you get a daily expenditure of 3/od or 18/od a week, or an annual expenditure of about £47. If you give this man ‘free’ municipal transport it will cost him £7 10s od a year.
Reflect on that.
MUCH INTEREST has been evinced in the scheme my highness propounded yesterday for a system of free municipal transport, the cost to be borne by the Corporation. It is obvious that the scheme is flawless financially, and it will repel only those who take fright at anything that is simple and straightforward and innocent of all bureaucratic complexity. But the idea is sound philosophically also. Consider one point. Why are the present transport company’s fares so high? Because, for one thing, the Company’s system is not used by all the citizens. This means that a system adequate to carry all the citizens must be maintained by the proportion of the citizens who have to use the trams and buses. Two classes shirk carrying their share of the cost of this essential urban amenity—those who use bicycles and those who use motor-cars. The cyclist is independent of public transport because he has succeeded in becoming a capitalist in a small way; his contribution to a rate-sustained transport system would be individually small but his numbers being great the aggregate would be considerable. The man who prefers to use his own motor-car and thus provides individual transport at enormous cost should not be permitted to do so if this action causes the cost of public transport to rise and thus causes hardship to the bulk of the people, who have not got the money to buy motor-cars. If you increase this man’s rates by about one third, he has nothing to complain about; he should provide his motor-car only after reasonable minimum transport has been provided for the public generally.
What would be the effect of the system on business? Assuredly not a bad effect. The coming and going of the citizens would be much more fluid. If I have a shop in O’Connell Street, I must lose thousands of sales in the course of a year because a prospective customer must pay a surcharge of sixpence or eightpence to the transport company in addition to the profit I demand myself. On the other hand, the transport company dumps tens of thousands of customers at my door week after week and beyond making a general payment to the community in consideration of the prominent location of my premises in the city business centre, I make no direct acknowledgement of the fact that public transport is absolutely essential to my livelihood. If my poor law valuation of £1,000 and a municipal transport scheme means that I must pay another £300 annually in rates, that is not unreasonable.
The ‘no-fares’ system has another big advantage. It would enable the transport system to be operated at costs lower than ever before experienced anywhere. Superficially, labour would be displaced but that problem has been met and dealt with successfully before. The present transport company employs probably a thousand conductors, perhaps fifty inspectors and supervisors and a large countinghouse staff; add to that expenditure on tickets and on the rental of ticket-punching machines and it is not clear that you would have much change out of £200,000 a year. That is an immediate and clear saving. You enter the vehicle at the front and the driver can easily carry out the elementary conducting duties that would remain.
The system introduces into public transport a principle that is well recognised in relation to other essential public services—namely, that everybody shares the burden of the service not according to the use he gets from it but according to his capacity to maintain public services. If a watermain extension to serve a new housing scheme costs £1,000, the tenants do not personally shoulder this crippling burden; it is spread over the whole administrative area and becomes a matter of farthings in the bill of each ratepayer. But the same remote tenants, under the present system, have to pay several thousands poundses to the transport company and will never have the continuing amenity of a watermain laid and working.
There is no real snag in this idea. Yet it will not be adopted because the Corporation and its citizens are too docile: obedientia civium urbis felicitas.
POST WAR COPPER PROBLEMS ran a heading I read some tie, McGow. I, superb piece of work, in understanding most like a dog, understood immediately what the article beneath the heading would deal with. (I guess it’s the human in me.) Let us pause here to ask what it is that we do in reading. (Pause.) Well, in all reading we abstract, we take only some of the possibilities of the words’ meanings into account. No matter how concrete (nay, copper) the topic or its treatment seems to be, we are abstracting, we are leaving out some of the possibilities, we are not asking your Aunt Agatha, we refuse to invite those frightful Shaughnessies, we could have young Lynch come and play the xylophone, but no, the hell with it, let’s have an intellectual party for once. Obviously, in reading (to narrow the thing down somewhat) in different sorts of reading we do this in different degrees but always … always keeping as near as possible to standard temperature and pressure. (My little standard joke—Baer with me, as Joe Louis used to say.) Hmmm. We let in (and should let in) less in reading such prose as this than we let in with most poetry, say … (Do you read poetry, de Wrieder, or are you out down town every night drinking your head off? Hmmmm? Drop me a card some time). Now, attention, please.
The important point is that in all reading whatsoever much must be left out. Otherwise we could arrive at no meaning and what a beautiful pity that would be! Or—half a moment, Mac!—or if we did arrive at a meaning we mightn’t be expected, they mightn’t have got our card, there would be black looks, hemming, haw act (since repeeled) and: Of course you’re always welcome won’t you take off those socks? Misther Meaning no sir there was never anny one of that name lived here there was Mick Manning of course the stoker that had this basement before me but he’s dead this twenty year. (How do you mean, I often ask myself? And should it be done in public? Meaning you know is a thing you can get a lot of praise for—if it’s done well. (Haha. Sharp dry laugh. Not really amused.) But, look—to get back to the pint (stet it has a head on it) omission is essential in the two-fold sense; without omission no meaning would form for us; through omission what we are trying to grasp becomes what it is (gets its essential being).
The only man that never learnt to omit was Father Dinneen, so that most of the words he has in his book, meaning all things, mean really nothing at all. Putting our point another way, we see that all ratiocinative processes of intellection are addressed, not so much to establishing meaning, but rather to establishing refinements of meaning. Thus the crude uncoloured outline of meaning, familiar even to the lower animals, is of little use to humans, who willingly traffic in nothing that is not recherché and sophisticated.
Example: a piece of steak. To your dog it has the primary meaning—food! This image begets the brother idea—eat! Now attend carefully please. To you, it is not food. You had refined the idea of food before it could enter your mind: you would have refined it to the more particular meaning ‘meat’ save that the same process forestalled you and you had refined ‘meat’ to ‘steak’. But again you were forestalled, ‘steak’ had become ‘raw steak’—and that really is what you perceived, apparently instantaneously but actually by several steps of reasoning. And of course, each image you admitted as valid excluded countless others you knew to be false: example, ‘horse-flesh’, ‘leather’.
Ah well! Need I say that when I read POST-WAR COPPER PROBLEMS, I immediately refused to admit two ‘meanings’. Number wan was the possibility that some of the cute lads in Justice were getting out sketchplans for … brain-new stainless arterial polismen, made of plastic material and 100 per cent prefabricated, to be laid on with th’electhric and the wather afther the waaaar. The other idea was that the men on the Dalkey cars were losing their knight’ sleep (they’re nearly all Ely Place men) about what to do with all the loose change afther the w.…
(There’s only one thing to do with loose change of course. Tighten it.)
I DISLIKE LABELS—rather I mean it’s not that they aren’t terribly useful. They are, old man. But do … do they sufficiently take account of one as … a … person? There is my dilemma. (How do you like his horns?) But I … I … (little indulgent laugh) I know humanity, its foibles, its frailties, its fatuities; I know how the small mind hates what can’t be penned into the humiliating five-foot shelf of its ‘categories’. And so … if you must libel me, sorry, wrong brief, if you must label me, if you must use one epithet to ‘describe’ a being who in diversity of modes, universality of character and heterogeneity of spatio-temporal continuity transcends your bathetic dialectic, if, in short, one … practically algebraic symbol must suffice to cover the world-searing nakedness of that ontological polymorph who is at once immaculate brahmin, austere neo-platonist, motor-salesman, mystic, horse-doctor, hackney journalist and ideological catalyst, call me … call me…(qu’importe en effet, tout cela?) call me … ex-rebel. Forget the grimy modest exterior, civilisation’s horrid camouflage of the hidden, inner, in-forming radiance. True that … economic stresses force one to spend oneself on … trifles (what with sherry halfdollar a halfglass and sponge-cake … Sponge-cake? Me good woman do you realise there’s a waaaaaaaaaaar on?). About the valid things, for instance, one must not write; ethics, plastics, authority what is its foundation in the compromise of the diurnal round (This is mine, I think?), the lust for Order (with its glamorous satellites, ‘beauty’ and ‘harmony’—not to mention ancient Hibernians), how to reconcile it with man’s unquenchable longing for Freedom? (Rather loosely put but you see what a Haeck Reuter is up against?)
I mean one’s soul is forgotten but one must be very simple in this kind of thing, and keep frightfully close to the bone, follow the telegraph wires it’s about four miles from here. You see, one is … one is simply a plain hack journalist, concerned with such prosaic things as … getting things across, smoothly, fair play to all, square deal for my masters, and never forget the eager throng of readers (certified) who so instinctively believe in their right to speak their mind that they, they will not be slow to let the Editor person know what they think of one’s pitiful work. Very Irish, very traditional, the only difference being that from the poor berated French Revolution onwards we spoke our mind against what poor John Mitchel called ‘The Carthaginian’ in spite of poison, debt and egg-soil. Now … (bitter laugh)…now we speak it against … writers … the Anglo-Irish, Liberals, individualists, children of the Renaissance and other contemptible … and unarmed … creatures!!!! Of course, when Truth is not paramount, one must cry aloud for Tolerance and free speech. Then as soon as Truth becomes paramount as result of our Tolerance and Freedom (!!!!!) … there is no longer any need for Tolerance—in fact it would be a crime. Grand. Grand. But … just a bit hard on those who … do not believe in ‘Absolutes’, not even in Truth permanent and fadeless. Just a bit hard on those to whom the ‘errors’ of … Plotinus are just as valid, and important as say those molten Iberian lyrics whose sensuous imagery gave Crashaw his melodic line and burning glass.
No, no, no, this is forbidden … And still—how wonderful, how indestructible is human nature! and still this man who goes to jail and death will go on saying ‘Alas, that Might can vanquish Right, They fell and passed away, but true Men like you Men, are plenty here today!’—the foolish Greek! the silly Renaissance ass!! The comic liberal! By heavens, this time once and for all we’ll eradicate from his silly carcass his thousand-year-old folly! … But enough! Pass me the strychnine, Mac, it is in the top left-hand corner of the chest of drawers under the old Ph.D (Heidelberg) scroll.
TODAY ONE of those flashes of intuition again lit me (from within) ignited, fused, shattered me with a light at once agonising in its implication, in its intimation of the loneliness, the sense of isolation, of … separation which is the penalty, the glorious, empty penalty, of the modest, harassed, poly-noetic super-person … and at the same time exalted and healed the restless, weary intellect, worked to a glistening, scarlet, over-sensitised … thread by the tremendous besogne of cramming a … light-year’s thought into three calendar months. I had, at last … realised, (in the sense ‘felt the truth of’) I had experienced in transcendant sense-immediacy a blinding illumination not without its message of goodwill for groping, under-privileged … dowdy humanity. I suddenly saw … quite clearly … sub specie aeternitatis … that that … strange object, so highly esteemed—(I might almost say esteamed) by our winsome, unscented housewives, even in its essentially knitted, parboiled form, as … a table delicacy … I saw, I tell you, that that … object is pregnant with great possibilities for gallant little Irish industry struggling valiantly to keep its head over the Plimsoll line in a world delirious with the excruciating slap-stick of Free Trade. Yes, I repeat, that odd cephalomorphous object can be made a vital element in our important warp production; from it, I promise you, shall spring a newer, greater and more glorious … wool trade, the markets of Cathay and Samarkand shall clamour for our incredible bawneens, the carriage trade of New York, Paris, Berlin shall come to our (intensely half-) door, our ships shall sail H.M. seven seas without Lett or Huendrans, wine shall incontinently bark on the winedark waterway, and Ireland long a province be a nation once again. I am, of course, quite serious. This great plastic is for the future and I am confident that given the time, the research, above all the money, our … Irish chemists will be more than equal to the task of extracting wool from its resilient, elastic heart. Meanwhile it is a matter of extreme urgency that the Public Real Asians Department of our Ministry for Agriculture should put before the public the dangers inevitably attendance upon the present attitude towards this essentially resinous mineral. Our … eager, and no doubt, affectionate, Irish wives must be made to see that though eating is … a necessary business, and … parboiling is an interesting way to treat objects intended for vulgar carnal provisionment … yet, not all sublunar Offal is really suitable for this purpose; alarm clocks, umbrellas, wax flowers, telescopes, carpets, wall-paper and hardwall plaster are instances of a few of such not terribly edible things. Another more obvious one is the interesting worsted bomb of which this evening I have been speaking.
One wonders what absent-minded colleen first dimly, myopically dropped one of these valuable reverse-calf objects into the melting pot and then … obstinate, though charming … insisted that poor Tadhg … eat it. The delirious, half laughable, whole lethal recipe spread from wife to wife, from mother to mother, from generation to generation until at the present day there exists scarcely an adult male in this island who has not at some time or other actually performed the intensely music-hall magic of … eating a … turnip! (I mean, it’s like drinking that most vitriolic of embrocations, milk!)
I admit it is dangerous suggesting that we do wrong by eating certain things on the mere ground that they can be manufactured into prams, pipe-racks or even newspapers—things obviously more important than grub. I would be personally bereaved if a way were found to convert oysters into policemen’s leggings. Such is the persistence and might of industry that ever after there would be no oysters nowhere. And who wants to go up to Jack Nugent for brown bread, stout and half a dozen leggings. As well expect policemen to put shells on their legs—even if it gives you the chance of making some joke about leg-shells.
PEOPLE—I suppose they are people really—frequently speak to me at some length on the subject of my ‘versatility’ and—Heaven forfend!—I am compelled to listen to their incomprehensible attempts at communication. On such occasions it is, as you may imagine, simply that I have permitted myself to be lured into making one of my rare appearances in public. (The making or even assembling of such appearances, whether in public or in private, has now been absolutely prohibited by Emergency Powers Order No. 487/e/iv—so do not blame your grocer, he is doing his best in difficult circumstances.) Is it … is it imagined that this chat … amuses … interests or even—O monstrous presumption—flatters me? I am quite appalled. It is like … it is like those rich young baggages who—good heavens, how coyly!—‘tell’ me that my personal beauty is of an unusually high order. But of course, of course. I know. The trivial iteration of facts adds nothing to my … enjoyment of life. Life … j’ai … j’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage. And … versatility? Is the bird of the air, forsooth, to be praised for flying, singing and laying edible eggs in the perilous tree-tops? It is, I think, natural for a person of my stamp (as poor Rowan Hamilton used to say) to embrace all human perfections and accomplishment (but excluding such as may be evil) within the mastery of my superb intellect, gracing not myself but all humanity with an artistic preminence that is withal saturated with an exquisite humility.
‘But … don’t you ever run short of ideas? How can you always write so … interestingly … so … so authoritatively about such a variety of things. Seldom, I mean, have … so many things been written for so many people … by so few a man.’
My reply is simple and, as always, truthful. ‘Madam, writing is the least of my occupations. Many other things, many many other things contribute to the sum of my cares. Vast things, things imponderable and ineluctable, terrible things, things which no other mortal were fit to hear of—things I must think upon only when utterly alone. Writing is surely a small thing, indeed. Difficulties Mmmmm. One is not conscious of them. There are, of course, five things and five things only that can be written about and though for me they have lost all interest as problems, I continue to write out of the depth of my feeling for dark groping humanity.’
With a slight bow I am about to turn when I am again assailed by my gross female interlocutor. Will I not tell her what these five things are?
A flicker, just a cup-shake, deforms the austere granite countenance, but true to the traditions of race and caste a courteous answer is forthcoming, courteous but with the sonorous quiver of doom rippling up to the calm word surface of my utterance. ‘The fastness of friendship, ma’am, the treachery of one’s nearest; the destruction of good by good. Passion which over-rides reason. VIOLENT AND PROUD DEATH!’
Sometimes I smile. I am not of this country, and my agriculture is essentially altero pede. But long as I am here I cannot contemplate unmoved the pageant of your great national bilingual revival as it so heroically unfolds itself in a positively promethean agony. The struggle is so unequal. On the one hand one sees massed the degrading influences of occidental Europe, dedicated—one appreciates—to the destruction of everything Irish. The sympathetic spectator like myself, who wishes you all so well, cannot but feel at the same time that this great polyglot … un-Irish monster will stop at nothing to achieve its evil ends. Its fearful decivilising influences, dominated by the internal combustion engine and with the anticipation of even greater domination in the world of the future saturated (as it will be) with the anti-gaelic evil of plastics, air-travel, television and mixed cinemas, will not be nullified without a long and bitter struggle.
I APPROVE of those Children’s Allowances (of course). For me the family is … everything. And what more lovely than a family of girls! Any person calling himself a man, any male party being one of H.M. Family Men in the U.K., anyone taking to himself the honourable style of Parent—nay, Guardian—any such jolly defendant leading (how false there sounds the Active Voice!) a life of quiet desperation, knows but too well what resinous high-tensile heartstrings bind the girls to … the grandest, finest, best and bravest old … Momma in Earl DeWarr, sorry in all the world. How dear to such fellows the familiar scene around the crackling log fire in the vast baronial hall assuming—just for the hell of it—a maximum fibre stress of 1,000 lbs/in (sq.) for each log. (Log tables may be obtained from the superintendent, need I say?)
Candle light twinkles wittily in the gleaming texture of the mahogany polished for many years by the Rt. Honble. Viscount French (himself). Vast elk-hounds sprawl on the tiger-skin pretending to be bored. Nervous under-proof malt pours itself obsequiously into gem encrusted goblets—thence as though by M’Gick into Jem’s encrusted gullet. Ha-ho! The festive season is over and grouped demurely around their lady mother’s skirt sit the daughters, fairest flowers in all of luxuriant Dublinshire, brightest jewels in Milord’s unmortgaged coronet—though of course he also takes ESQUIRE (out of the Club reading-room, egad!)—fifteen lovelier hawsies Herr Kuehls himself could not find in all the Emerald Doyle. And who knows it better than papa himself … if it be not his good lady, née Locke (—Lough Neagh is another day’s work, Joe). What an old … saint she is! Look at her, look at her …! Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come’ … and the eye-lids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how they would be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampi … (O blast, wrong job—get me the works; this means that Flanagan must go.) I must apologise for that break in the programme; it was due to … technical trouble beyond our control. We hope to resume in a few minutes and … in the meantime perhaps you would care to listen to some organ music. (Not merely organ parsley.)
While we’re waiting, here’s a few jokes. Did you ever look up Thom’s Directory under Chatham Row? Do you know what they have—this’ll make you laugh. They have THE MUSICIPAL SCHOOL OF MUSIC. Isn’t that funny? The last word, of course, should be MUNICH. (Don’t münchen it Mac.) Ah, here’s the programme back again. Good … look at her, gentlemen, positively twinkling with affection and humour under the snowy aureole of her fine-spun white hair coiled in its bower of petit point; look at those fine hands, never idle; regard only, I pray, the curve of that exquisite mouth, so pregnant of joy and humour, see but the little droop at the lip’s corner … Ah yes, this is beauty, not perhaps as the world knows it, but this is the species faciei super stabilem aetatem indeed. And the little jests, the little family quips, how endearing. ‘Children!’ ‘Yes, dear Momma!’ The eager loving faces, elfin in the flicker of 20,000 candles. ‘Which loves Mother most?’ It is little Myrtle, of course, who answers before the pack; not least in beauty she, not greatest in knowledge of the ‘world’. ‘I, Momma, darling!’ ‘Right. Get the medicine bottle from the top left hand drawer of the dressing table.’ And off goes the young angel, but not without inquiring: ‘Shall I bring the vermouth or will you have it neat, dear Momma?’
Ah dear me.
I AM, of course, terribly interested in matter. We are not the men our fathers were. (A good job, in a way. If we were, we would be … terribly old.) It is becoming more and more difficult to grow wheat in this country. The climate yearly grows less frigid. I have not had my skates on for forty-eight years. We have little phosphates. The wild raspberry is now rarely seen.
But this is very confused. This morning I wish to draw attention to a very serious matter. My theme—though difficult, I will endeavour to propound in a number of simple propositions. Attend, please—all!
1. Matter is indestructible.
2. Matter in the raw is apprehended as earth or ‘dust’.
3. Matter, through the action of living cells which pervade it, changes itself into many forms. What was clay a while ago now appears for a brief moment as a flower, a tree or a cow. Each of these things ultimately ‘dies’ and returns to be clay.
4. Everything that the eye can see, with the possible exception of fire and water, is made of clay.
5. It is beyond question that the chemical composition of clay governs the type and vigour of, say, the crop it will grow, and the Department of Agriculture maintains a Soil Testing Station to advise agriculturists in this regard.
6. Certain manures and fertilisers are known to be necessary for the raising of crops and other dressings are required to combat specific diseases to which certain crops are prone.
No sane person will question the truth of these six propositions. The only other point I wish to make is this—that man also is clay. The mass of the human body (we confine ourselves strictly to the physical here) is made up of the soil where it grows up. The food that nourishes it is the clay, which yields up its salts and substances in the appetising and attractive form of cabbage and beef and spuds. A man born in Ireland and reared here is therefore an Irishman according to far more extreme criteria than the speaking of Gaelic, wearing bicycle-clips at dances, or winning hand-ball medals. He is Ireland. He is temporarily a little bit of Ireland walking about on two rather ungainly pink stilts.
To say this is probably to say what everybody knows and admits. Why then do we not use this momentous grain of knowledge? For years most of the inhabitants of Glasgow were bandy-legged. This was due, it was discovered, to a deficiency of lime in the city’s water supply. Lime was added, and now Glasgow has a straight-legged citizenry. Why cannot regard be had to far more critical deficiencies in soil? Why must tuberculosis flourish in this country, and bad teeth, and rickets, and all manner of respiratory diseases. Simply because the chemical composition of the soil of Ireland is unbalanced. The authorities have the matter in hand, of course. They are talking, I think, of … adding calcium to … flour! Why not add calcium to Ireland? Flour is only a tiny fraction of Ireland; calcium is also needed in many other fractions.
Even leave aside disease for the moment. We have the name of being a quarrelsome and intractable people. This is due to some unbalance in the composition of the soil. If, many years ago, people who came here with fire and sword to bend us to their will had brought instead great shiploads of, say, sodium bicarbonate and dumped the stuff everywhere, we would now be … well, very different persons, with very dissimilar politics. Possibly there would have been less trouble in the past.
What is Ireland? Even the Chief State Chemist would probably reply ‘an island surrounded by water’. I suggest that it is about time somebody found out what Ireland is. People keep saying glibly that agriculture is ‘important’. If they only knew how important!
How very very enlightening to analyse the soil of the Six Counties! Have you not there a key to the problem of Partition?
WERE CLEMENCEAU alive today, he would be the first to admit that he and I went rather too far in respect of ‘democracy’ and ‘self-determination’ some years back when in a Swiss city, surrounded by the Higher Executive Officers of the European, Asiatic and Eurasian civil services, we sought far into the night to … to … unmess the peoples of this hemisphere. There was not a man of our obsequious pale-handed advisers who was not on his max., not a few held directorships, not unfee-ed in prosperous mercantile undertakings and some—heavens!—swaggered into the Blue Train on some sort of a Director’s Pass. They were very fine, entirely reliable, they had several matters under active consideration. I am convinced that Clemenceau and I listened too much to these people. We were misled on the nature of human happiness. We thought—heaven help our wit!—that happiness could be devised and legislated. We did not then realise that the science of politics—being the name for continual and malicious interference with the primitive structure of society by so-called intellectuals—was the fons et orig O’Malley.
At that time I was ignorant of the Chinese tongue, my knowledge of the Tibetan dialects was imperfect; of Bulgar poetry I knew but little—yet I can now say, after many years of retirement and study, after a perusal of all the literatures of the earth (nor does the last word exclude the hydroïc esquimeau ethos), after an appraisal of all civilisations not incompatible with the Gaelic norm to which all legitimate human sophistication must be related, I have seen it to be universally acknowledged that all sound and stable pre-political communities were composed of peasants and kings—and of nothing else. It seems that the love of a princeling for a commoner was everywhere the beginning of politics, for instantly ‘councillors’ had to be summoned, a scandal averted, someone whisked out at midnight through the postern gate. At that humble back-door was the civil service born. Yet this mésalliance persisted and the offsprings of it today people the earth. Those who are not kings and not peasants. The egregious, the degenerate, those strayed from two folds. The trouble-makers. The War-makers.
Sceptre and crown must tumble down, Shirley said, and in the dust be equal made, with the poor crooked scythe and spade. Observe this same theme in the Gaelic:
no taed for lár mar lasán;
is mochen do’n té rusfoi,
in maiten buadach bithnái …
Atchí aiged cach tige
soillsigios tuath is fine …
This idea persists in all primitive literatures, even to the exclusion of the love theme. Observe even Horace:
‘Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede
pauperum tabernas
Regumque turres …’
It was, as I have discovered, the upset of that antithetical human relationship—the ‘progress’ of the ‘under-privileged’, moryaa—that has led to the present mess. I confess I speak as a member of the ruling classes yet I have no bitterness and if all the male members of the tenantry I am, before heaven, entitled to have, are policemen in Detroit, I can say from my heart that I pity them. In me they would have known a loving father.
All this is apropos of what? I read in the papers that some fine Irishmen have declared that we must all live like the good folk in the Gaeltacht, leading that simple life, speaking that far-from-simple language, presumably occupying ourselves with the uncomplicated agricultural chores which distinguish all ethnic groups the world over which have been denied the enervating influence of H.M. English language. Uniquely, a large section of our people wish to be peasants, thus giving hope of a return to the primal balance to which I have referred. To the plain people of Ireland I will make a fair offer. If, gathering together in solemn conclave ye pledge yerselves to be humble unsophisticates unacquainted with English, innocent of all sciences save that of the smiling Irish fields, I, for my part, am prepared to be King. His Most Gracious Majesty, Myles the First.
NO DOUBT you saw at the Planning Exhibition the big map of Ireland laid out on the floor, you stopped and saw the bulbs go on showing where everything would be in the future. You were very interested in it all and left, reflecting that at no far distant day Ireland would take her place among the nations of the earth. You may have speculated, as I did, on the mysterious alternative that might admit Ireland to that sinister conclave, the nations not of the earth.
In certain of their moments, the planners surprise me. At one point they turned on a little forest, one at every important point in the country. Do you know what these lights stood for? Great new sanatoria! Do they … do they mean to tell me that we are going to have … disease…in the new planned Ireland. Have they a dastardly scheme under which pain will still be possible? Are we—great heaven!—to be permitted to … to … to die in the new Ireland? If the answer to these questions is yes, then I say all this planning is a ramp. I solemnly warn Pat to look out for himself. Hospitals are being planned for him, clinics, health centres, streamlined dispensaries. I can see the new Ireland all right, in mime-hind’s eye. The decaying population tucked carefully in white sterilised beds, numb from drugs, rousing themselves only to make their wills in Irish. Outside, not a stir anywhere to be discerned—save for the commotion of funerals hurtling along the vast arterial roads to the vast arterial cemeteries—planned by architects, need I say—where tombs and tomb-stones are prefabricated in plastics. It is my considered view that Paud keeping step with world hysteria in the belief that he is being ‘modern’ is a woeful spectacle, is nowise funny. He has got himself a lot of graphs and diagrams and he is beginning to babble about ‘built-in furniture’. Give him just a little rope and he will demolish any decent houses he may have and go and live in insanitary ‘prefabricated’ shells, the better and the sooner to qualify for the new glass-brick sanatorium.
Dublin must do without the boon of an underground because it lacks the density of population that would sustain such a system economically. Similarly, the whole country lacks the population that would sustain even the fraction of ‘planning’ that is proper to the temperament and economy of this country. Eighty percent of what has been put before us is blatant imitation of what tremendous and strictly local revolutions have thrown up elsewhere and our ‘planners’ have lacked the wit to dish up even some native sort of jargon. The problem to be addressed here is simply that of the falling birth-rate; time enough to build your—well yes, vast arterial—roads with eight carriage-ways when the day has come in rural Ireland when from every house another house is to be seen, when ‘conversation’ in rural Ireland no longer means a demented monologue muttered through toothless gums, the old man crouched over the fire nursing the noggin of lethal ‘tea’.
What then is the optimum population of Ireland? Nobody can say. But certain it is that our present population is too low by several millions. To plan so elaborately the material surroundings of the few folk one sees around doesn’t make sense, at least to this most rational tanist. As well erect traffic lights in a grave-yard.
I admit, however, that it would be a bit … brutal to snatch his plans away from paddy, even if he is holding them upside down. He loves them so much. I hear he’ll be getting into long trousers next year. And after that, please God, Clongowes.
GOT A RING from the Central Bank the other day—can you come at once, Brennan and the Board want to see you immediately, something terrible has happened …?
You see? Never a moment to myself (of all people). The daily grind. I must say ‘Central Bank’ is good. Is it not a little bit … undignified to emphasise the ‘cent’ so much? Or can it be a sly hint that they actually have a stock of those mysterious rubies—‘roubles’, one had almost said—red cents? A great vaulted agglomeration of tossers, preserved in sacred trust for the most honourable Irish nation I had the honour to found back there in ’21?
But this summons, I would not care to ignore it, of course. One never knows, I sighed, put on that rather tattered remnant of my cricketing days—my overcoat—and then wheeled out my decrepit insanitary bicycle. Just as I expected—flat again! There was nothing forehead but the pump, though none better knew than I that the pump itself was punctured and gave a return for only 2 per cent. of the energy put into it. After twenty minutes’ work, involving irreparable damage to the valves (and not those of the tyres, I assure you—but the heart!) I was in position to travel. I managed to get about 500 yards from my house when all the air flew out of the other tyre. It had begun to rain heavily at this time. I had to get down off the bicycle (via the back-step, for I am rather old-fashioned in these matters) and resumed work with the pump in the middle of the downpour. When I had this front tyre reasonably pumped—half an hour of my life had passed by in the meantime—I discovered that the other tyre was again soft. This I remedied, though the palpitations were alarming in the extreme. Another mile’s precarious progress and I discovered that the valve-rubber in the front tyre was rotten. Happily I had a spare, but another half-hour’s ‘pumping’ was involved. During all this interval air was escaping from the back tyre, and after another very brief ride the wheel became completely flat. On this occasion my exertions with the pump were so frenzied that the despicable instrument came away in bits in my moist hands. I was now stranded in the rain. I had begun to walk it when a passing small boy consented to allow me to use his pump for a fee of one shilling. For a second shilling he was prepared to supply labour also. By the time I was again in the saddle, the front tyre had begun to evince an ominous bumpiness. I had savagely made up my mind to continue riding with a flat front tyre when—quite suddenly—the two-shillings-worth of air in my back tyre suddenly ran out of it, making further equitation impossible. My heart palpitations were still violent, the pulse quick, temperature up, respiration irregular and painful. I managed to dismount and rested for some time under a sodden tree. I was on my way to … the Central Bank, mind you. ?Central!
When I arrived there eventually, wheeling my airless bicycle, I was a much older man. Seventeen attempts to borrow pumps on the way had been fruitless. It is true that one pump was proffered but I had no rubber connexion and it was useless.
I fear I showed my exhaustion somewhat, though I always try to appear business-like and calm in the presence of subordinates. The Board was solicitous, offered the deepest chair, produced the brandy.
‘And now, gentlemen,’ I asked, ‘what can I do for you? What seems to be the trouble?’
The Chairman opened up.
‘We wanted to have your advice on an important matter. Frankly, we are very worried about the danger of inflation. Inflation, if by any chance it should become widespread in this country …’
I … I … I ask you! (!!!)
MAGNUM EST veritas et in vino praevalebit! Some things are bitter but if they be true, should they then be suppressed? A thousand times no, nor do I count the cost to purse, fair name or honour, least of all my own. I say this with reluctance but say it I must:
Last night I was drunk!
(Sensation.) No, no (makes nervous gestures), do not think I exaggerate, do not whisper that fumes of deadliest spirits were held to my nostrils as I slept. It is absolutely true and I blame nobody but myself. I was simply caught off my guard. There can be no excuses. From myself I demand the high standards I prescribe for others.
Tell you how it happened. Sitting in my offices last night as Regional Commissioner for the Townships of Geashill and Philipstown Daingean, a servitor enters and hands me a document. You would never—nor did I—guest what it was. A sealed order from the Department of Local Governments … dissolving me! ME! Wellll …!
Extraordinary sensation. First to go is the head, the whole thing falling away into blobs of yellow liquid running down and messing into the liquefacting chest, then the whole immense superstructure seeping down the decomposing legs to the floor … a … most … frightful business, nothing left of me after three minutes only a big puddle on the floor!
Happily my secretary rushed in, guessed what had happened and had the presence of mind to get most of me into an empty champagne bottle I had in my desk. Have you ever, reader, looked at the world from inside a bottle? Found yourself laboriously reversing a word like TOUQCILC? Phew! Have you ever, possessing the boast that not once did breath of intoxicating liquor defile your lips, literally found yourself a one-bottleman? Ever had to console yourself with a bitter jest about your ‘bottle-dress’? Ever found what seemed to be your head being hurt by … a cork? As for the curse of bottle-shoulders, is there any use in talking? Here, though, is a hint. The curvature of the bottle causes violent refraction and if you have any fear that my own fate could one day be yours, be counselled by what I say: always carry special spectacles. It pays in the long run!
Let me continue. My secretary, when leaving to go home, placed me for some reason on the mantelpiece in a rather prominent position but first typed out a little label marked POISON—NOT TO BE TAKEN and stuck it on the bottle. A stupid business, really—whence comes this idea that everybody can read or that those who can always believe what they see? Actually I should have been locked away in the bottom drawer of my desk or put into the big press I have marked ‘MAPS’. What I feared happened, though it could have been worse. After an hour or so a charlady arrived and began to clean the place up, having first put some of my valuable documents in her bin. She was later joined by an unusual character, a chargentleman, apparently her husband. I do not suppose he was three seconds in the room when he was conscious of myself, on the mantelpiece in the bottle. He calls the wife’s attention, then over, whips me down, takes out the cork and begins to sniff at me.
‘Portuguese, begob,’ he mutters.
‘You’ll put that bottle down that’s what you’ll do,’ the charlady says severely.
‘I’ll go bail it’s that Portuguese shandy that carried Harry off around the Christmas,’ the ruffian mutters.
Next thing … I’m at his head! Phewwww! It seems, however, that I tasted rather worse than he was prepared to endure because he took only a few sips of me, then bashed the cork back in disgust.
Well, what … an … incredible … experience! I managed to get back next day, but it took me all my time and was a most dangerous business. My sole consolation? That if it was I who was drunk, it was the chargentleman who had the hangover!
A THING that you might consider when you have time is the wasteful and ‘unscientific’ structure of language. I mean—say in English—the number of simple economically-devised sounds which are not ‘words’ and which have no meaning—while gigantic regiments of letters are assembled to form words which have simple meanings and which take a long time to say or write. An example of the latter—‘valetudinarianism’. As regards the former, consider the satisfactory syllable ‘pot’. Substitute any other vowel you like and you get a ‘word’—pat, pet, pit, put. There you have efficiency, economy. Such invention saves everybody’s time; even school-children see there is reason there and are not resentful. But ‘bat’—that is defective in the ‘o’ unless you countenance the slang of vintners in letting you have three of ‘Beaune’ (manufactured from sheeps’ offals in a Tipperary haggard) at 55/6 per knock as a personal favour. You can’t go all the way with ‘get’ without having to be cellulose-american and git a gat. Indeed, the efficient three-letter monosyllable is the exception. ‘Not’ looks good but when you try it out, you find it is, well … not. Fan? No. Fag? No. Tan? Yes, by gob, but rather brewish in its less easy moments. Lag? No. Mad is no use without med. and mod., interesting Trinity baubles. Dog is hopeless. Pan is encouraging, but will not fry your fish.
There are four-letter combinations like ‘pack’, say, which manage the whole five vowels. ‘Band’ is all right if you recognise the intrusion of German words.
(Flash-back: ‘Bag’ works in the three-letter group). ‘Fall’ is fine till you try to put it through the machine. So is ‘hell’. ‘Pall’ might be permitted, gratia ‘mell’ and Goldsmith.
What? Is that so? And pray how many four-letter words can you find?
‘Ball’ is another. Still another is … (Frowns heavily, regrets bitterly having started such awful nonsense, stares into blazing ESB radiator in watery-eyed perplexity.) Still another is … mure. There is such a word.
How about five-letter words? There is one good one—hillo. My dictionary says ‘int. used to hail distant person or to express surprise at meeting. Cf. hallo’. Cf. also hello, hullo and hollo—‘shout; call to hounds’. My whole point is this: You have, say, stamp and stump. Why doesn’t stimp mean something? Take the other two missing words …
Awful Wife (suddenly): What’s wrong with you?
Startled Reader: Me? Nothing.
Wife: You have been staring out of the window and moving your lips.
Reader: What? Me?
Wife: Are you saying your prayers?
Reader (annoyed): I happened to be reading the leading article in today’s paper. (Reads aloud.) Manifestly, it would be folly to underestimate the resources still at the disposal of the High Command and time alone will determine the soundness or otherwise of the strategy adopted in the gigantic issue now being joined …
Wife (undeceived): You were probably reading that awful man Chaplin or whatever he calls himself. How any person can sit … and read that rubbish is more than I can tell. Did you see my glasses anywhere? And look at the time. Mollie is still out and it’s half ten. I’ve asked you a hundred times to speak to that girl …
(I’m sorry for you, reader.)
Begins to mutter. Sorry for you. Far, fur, fir, for—O blast!!!
FLYING from Lisbon to Foynes the other day, I beguiled (what but?) the time with Hesketh Pearson’s book on Bernard Shaw and a recent copy of Mr Sean O Faolaín’s periodical The Boll. I was interested to see that Shaw has been at his old game of copying other people. In one of his letters (how meticulously composed for publication) he calls somebody a ‘whitemailer’. Who, reader, invented this type of jest? Who patented wintersaults, old ralgia, footkerchiefs and a thousand other jewels? (Not that I mind.)
A thing occurred to me about this newly formed Shaw Society. I approve of it, the vice-presidency of the concern I would gladly have accepted had not a false shyness deterred the founders from approaching me; guineas three I would have contributed without demur. It appears that the Society has no headquarters. (Notice how pertly ‘footquarters’ bobs up?) I was thinking of getting on to Wylie to have the Society permanently housed at the Shaw Grounds in Ballsbridge. It could be done, mind you, given co-operation and goodwill.
Pearson’s book on Shaw is not very good. Like the entire breed of biographies, it is too devout. It was precisely this sort of devotional literature, piling mountain-high during Victoria’s reign (all uncover, please) that caused the equally distorted portraits of latter-day debunkers. Biography is the lowest form of letters and is atrophied by the subject’s own censorship, conscious or otherwise. And when one finds (as one does rarely) that a subject is prepared to take the lid completely off and reveal the most humiliating infirmities without a blush, one usually finds that one is dealing with an exhibitionist who delights in adding on fictitious villainies. George Moore was a mild case. ‘Some men kiss and never tell; Moore tells but never kisses.’
There is nothing of much interest in Mr O Faolain’s issue of The Ball. The only thing that caught my eye was an editorial preamble to an article entitled ‘Why I Am “Church of Ireland”’:
It is part of the policy of THE BALL to open as many windows as possible on as many lives as possible so that we may form a full and complete picture of this modern Ireland which we are making …
I discern a certain want of candour in the statement that this is part of the policy of the paper. What are the other parts and why suppress them? Would a ‘full and complete’ statement of policy be embarrassing? Hmmmm. But what I can’t get right at all is this question of the windows. Let us suppose that the ‘lives’ in question are indoor and that the Paul Prys are outside, getting their socks damp in the shrubbery. Surely whatever is to be seen can be seen through one window. But forget even that. Why in heaven’s name must we go about opening windows. The whole point about a window is that you can see in or out when the window is closed. Moreover, it is no joke opening a closed window from outside—though I admit that (even from the inside) a window that is not closed is even harder. And what distinction is implied. I demand, as between ‘full’ and ‘complete’? As to ‘this modern Ireland we are making’, one can only point out (a) that it would be a queer business if it was a medieval … China we are making and anyhow, (b) that we are not making any Ireland. We just live here (the travel ban)—some of us even work here.
I can almost hear some reader inquiring how I liked flying from Lisbon to Foynes. Well … fair. The weather was pretty bad and I found the journey tiring. I have practically made up my mind that next time I will use an aeroplane. Know any cure for aching arms?
SOMEBODY SHOULD write a monograph on the use of the word ‘supposed’ in this country. Start listening for it, either in your own mouth or in others’, and you will see that it comprises the sum of the national character, that it is a mystical synthesis of all our habits, hopes and regrets. There is no immediately obvious and neat Irish equivalent, and I opine that the discovery of this word ‘supposed’ may have been a factor in the change over to English. You meet a man you know as you take a walk on the strand at Tramore. ‘Of course I’m not supposed to be here at all,’ he tells you, ‘I’m supposed to be gettin’ orders for th’oul fella in Cork. I’m here for the last week. How long are you staying?’
The words occur most frequently in connexion with breaches of the law or in circumstances where the gravest catastrophes are imminent. You enter a vast petrol depot. The place is full of refineries, pumps, tanks, a choking vapour fills the air. The man on the spot shows you the wonders and in due course produces his cigarettes and offers you one. ‘Of course I needn’t tell you,’ he comments as he lights up, ‘there’s supposed to be no smoking here.’
You enter a tavern, meet a friend, invite him to join you in a drink. He accepts. He toasts your health, takes a long sip, and replaces the glass on the counter. He then taps his chest in the region of the heart. ‘As you know,’ he remarks, ‘I’m not supposed to touch this stuff at all.’
You have been to some very late and boring function. You are going home, you feel you need a drink, you are a gentleman and know nothing whatever about the licensing laws. Naturally you rap at the door of the first pub you see. All is in darkness. The door opens, a head appears, it peeps up the street and then down; next thing you are whisked in.
‘We’re supposed to be closed, you know.’
Kreisler is not a great violinist, in the view of the Irish. He is supposed to be one of the greatest violinists in the world. Nor is Irish the national language of Ireland, the Constitution enacted by the people notwithstanding. It’s supposed to be. You are not supposed to use gas during the off-hours. You are not supposed to change the lie of your golf ball to very adjacent, if favourable, terrain when your opponent is not looking. You are not supposed to use electric radiators, nor are you supposed to own a radio set without paying the licence. Not more than eight people are supposed to stand inside a bus. You are aware that your colleague was at the races when he was supposed to be sick, but you’re not supposed to know and certainly you’re not supposed to report such an occurrence. You are not supposed to pay more than the controlled price for rationed commodities. You are not supposed to import uncustomed liquors. You are not supposed to use your wife’s hair-brush on the dog. You are not supposed to use the firm’s telephone for private trunk calls.
And so on. In no such context does the phrase ‘not supposed’ connote a prohibition. Rather does it indicate the recognition of the existence of a silly taboo which no grown-up person can be expected to take seriously. It is the verbal genuflection of a worshipper who has come to lay violent hands on the image he thus venerates. It is our domestic password in the endemic conspiracy of petty lawlessness.
All that I believe to be true, though possibly I’m not supposed to say it so bluntly.
I HAPPENED to glance at my hands the other day and noticed they were yellow. Conclusion: I am growing old (though I claim that I am not yet too old to dream). Further conclusion: I should set about writing my memoirs. Be assured that such a book would be remarkable, for to the extraordinary adventures which have been my lot there is no end. (Nor will there be.) Here is one little adventure that will give you some idea.
Many years ago a Dublin friend asked me to spend an evening with him. Assuming that the man was interested in philosophy and knew that immutable truth can sometimes be acquired through the kinesis of disputation, I consented. How wrong I was may be judged from the fact that my friend arrived at the rendezvous in a taxi and whisked me away to a licensed premises in the vicinity of Lucan. Here I was induced to consume a large measure of intoxicating whiskey. My friend would not hear of another drink in the same place, drawing my attention by nudges to a very sinister-looking character who was drinking stout in the shadows some distance from us. He was a tall cadaverous person, dressed wholly in black, with a face of deathly grey. We left and drove many miles to the village of Stepaside, where a further drink was ordered. Scarcely to the lip had it been applied when both of us noticed—with what feelings I dare not describe—the same tall creature in black, residing in a distant shadow and apparently drinking the same glass of stout. We finished our own drinks quickly and left at once, taking in this case the Enniskerry road and entering a hostelry in the purlieus of that village. Here more drinks were ordered but had hardly appeared on the counter when, to the horror of myself and friend, the sinister stranger was discerned some distance away, still patiently dealing with his stout. We swallowed our drinks raw and hurried out. My friend was now thoroughly scared, and could not be dissuaded from making for the far-away hamlet of Celbridge; his idea was that, while another drink was absolutely essential, it was equally essential to put as many miles as possible between ourselves and the sinister presence we had just left. Need I say what happened? We noticed with relief that the public house we entered in Celbridge was deserted, but as our eyes became more accustomed to the poor light, we saw him again: he was standing in the gloom, a more terrible apparition than ever before, ever more menacing with each meeting. My friend had purchased a bottle of whiskey and was now dealing with the stuff in large gulps. I saw at once that a crisis had been reached and that desperate action was called for.
‘No matter where we go,’ I said, ‘this being will be there unless we can now assert a superior will and confound evil machinations that are on foot. I do not know whence comes this apparition, but certainly of this world it is not. It is my intention to challenge him.’
My friend gazed at me in horror, made some gesture of remonstrance, but apparently could not speak. My own mind was made up. It was me or this diabolical adversary: there could be no evading the clash of wills, only one of us could survive. I finished my drink with an assurance I was far from feeling and marched straight up to the presence. A nearer sight of him almost stopped the action of my heart; here undoubtedly was no man but some spectral emanation from the tomb, the undead come on some task of inhuman vengeance.
‘I do not like the look of you,’ I said, somewhat lamely.
‘I don’t think so much of you either,’ the thing replied; the voice was cracked, low and terrible.
‘I demand to know,’ I said sternly, ‘why you persist in following myself and my friend everywhere we go.’
‘I cannot go home until you first go home,’ the thing replied. There was an ominous undertone in this that almost paralysed me.
‘Why not?’ I managed to say.
‘Because I am the—taxi-driver!’
Out of such strange incidents is woven the pattern of what I am pleased to call my life.
ONE HEARS a lot of talk about ‘Greater Dublin’ (most of it unauthorised by me and therefore mischievous) but never a mention of the sticking-out corollary that, according as you increase Dublin, you diminish the rest of Ireland proportionately. This, of course, is a very serious matter. Some fine day the inhabitants of Leixlip will notice something usual about the horizon and, sending forth scouts to investigate, will find it is Dublin. Dublin just down the road today. Tomorrow? The tide will have engulfed ancient Leixlip, the inhabitants will be answerable to Hernon, Keane and Monks. People will write letters addressed ‘Main St Leixlip, Dublin, C.98’ and you will probably be able to get there on the 16 bus. People in Athlone will say ‘You saw what happened in Leixlip. They thought they were safe, that their unborn sons would never be Dublin men. Hodie Leixlip, Cras nobis. Let us menfolk take to the hills, let our women-folk be instructed in the art of baking cakes containing keys. To arms!’
‘Greater Dublin’ is fine if you provide pari passu for Greater Ireland. How can this be done? There will be some who will ask that Ireland, sword in hand, should embark on vast imperial conquests. My pledged word to Clemenceau forbids this course, even if other considerations did not make it impracticable.
Two things occur to me. You remember my recent lecture on the export of agricultural produce to Britain, how I explained that with every export of beast, man and great hundred of eggs, we were permanently expatriating a quantum of the essential constituents of the Irish earth, and thus impoverishing the material from which Irish humans are made. Suppose you accelerate this process, some churl will say, suppose you capture the entire British food trade? Would not Britons, nourished solely on Irish bullocks and Irish malt, become as Irish in their physical make-up as the Irish themselves? Develop high cheek-bones, play hurley, fight and become inexorably opposed to compulsory Irish? Write banned books? Become … neutral?
The answer is yes and no. First, the process of metabolic hibernicisation would never be complete owing to the fact that it would be difficult for an Irish government to prevent the English people from continuing to drink English water, or to compel them to import Irish water. Water is most important since it contains many of the indigenous salts which determine national temperament. You read a lot of nonsense in the history books about foreigners having come to conquer, being ‘absorbed’ by the Irish. Actually, the poor devils had to eat and drink here, like everybody else. Until chemistry and history are fused in a biological survey of the origins and sustenances of life, there can be no realistic approach to almost any contemporary problem. The other point I must make is this: suppose we went all out to gaelicise the British through the medium of the long gut, suppose we achieved a large measure of success—what, pray, would remain here? If you export all the essential Irish nutriments and if there be ‘people’ still living here, who are they? Hmmmm.
No, additional Ireland must be sought in a different way. It is really quite simple. The present Ireland must first carry out an elaborate survey of its own soil. Thereafter must be sent throughout the known world an army of Irish chemists analysing the soil of every land wherein people dwell. Golden sovereigns will I bet that you will find certain countries, certain areas, wherein the soil is, in structure and composition, identical with that of Ireland. The people of that country—surprised though they be to learn the fact—are Irish! Thus can you evolve a world-confederation of Irelands, an empire based on a homogeneity of stomach-trouble. Such an association would long outlast, I ween, anything based on fire and sword. (It would be damn funny if the British turned out to be thoroughly Irish all along. Trouble is they would say (casually, by way of reply to some hon. and gallant member) that the Irish were British all along.)
I DO NOT WISH, at this peaceful time, to trouble you with personal matters, still less to obtrude questions affecting my personal honour and prestige. But an item appeared recently in this newspaper which, if allowed to pass unchallenged, might do serious damage. An oddly retrospective condition attached to it, as may be seen. At a Dublin meeting a speaker said (I assume, of course, that newspapers do not lie):
‘If Plato had been the Colossus of the ancient world of thought, Shaw was the Colossus of the modern world …’
Since apparently he wasn’t the whole proposition seems to fall through. But there was more, which pl. note:
‘In variety of subject and profundity of thought Shaw equalled Plato; in the staggering boldness of his proposals he surpassed him. Shaw’s work,’ the speaker added, ‘was shot through with two fundamental convictions—creative evolution and a basic income.’
You will, dear reader, doubtless have noticed something rather funny about all this. I’m sure it was unintentional; I like to believe that no insult was intended … but … not a word about me in the whole thing from beginning to end! (!!!) I don’t mind, of course—if people choose to make fools of themselves I don’t give a damn one way or the other. But in common decency don’t you think there’d have been even just a word? But no. No mention whatever.
Ah well! Mind you, it’s not that I’ve anything against Shaw. Shaw is one of the best, we used to see a lot of each other during the old cycling days, many’s the fiver he borrowed off me in the Vegetarian Restaurant and to this day I never have an opening in the West End but he comes along and sits there in the stalls munching watercress sandwiches, but … calling him a Colossus of the ancient world! And then this business of shootings and convictions. Shure … how many bullet wounds and incarcerations for the freedom of political thought I have myself and is there ever a word out of me about it? And … variety of thought and staggering proposals …? Shur, glory be, man, what is that only a mild watered-down specification of my humble daily chores for H.M. Irish Times in the U.K.? And that, be the same token, brings me to the last point—basic income. I said—basic income … (Editor begins to cough, bites nails, looks out of window). I said the labourer is worthy of his hire. I haven’t got the basic income of me good friend George B. Shaw, I may tell you. It’s not that I haven’t brains—I have more brains in me little finger than your man has in his whole beard. Did you ever see my play, hah? (You had to be quick as it happens.) Ever read my novels, biographies, political tracts? My denunciations of what is evil, meretricious, unworthy? Shure, great heavens, there’s no comparison. It’s not that Shaw’s plays aren’t good—the Student Prince is a lovely thing. ‘Pig’ Malone is fine, and Rose Marie and Charley’s Aunt—these are all blooming lovely things—a man doesn’t get a reputation for nothing, mind you, but a man should have a bit more than that to his credit before you start calling him a Colossus of the ancient world, that’s all I say. (Incidentally, where does Professor Joad come into this hasty evaluation of ratiocinative grandeur?) Of course, the basic income is a great help—note that all that unfriendly speech was made at a meeting of the Royal Georgian and Shavian Association of Ireland. Perhaps … certain parties have it in their minds that maybe they’re mentioned in a certain will …?
(Pause. Twilight falls. Voice is heard speaking in the gloaming):
How well the crowd in this town would never think of forming a M na gC Society! It’d be such a … a … fine tribute to an old man! And with a statue in College Green, my back turned to Trinity! (I still say I have the figure to wear a stone beard and stone frock coat!)
KNOWLEDGE and learning are funny things if you like. Take for example that old question of the genuineness of the last fifteen words of Plato’s Phaedo, in the epilogue after Socrates has had his jar. Many commentators hold that the use of the phrase tón tote is so odd and out of context that it invalidates the entire passage after andros; others hold that it is merely ‘a slip’ and that the passage is genuine. Hear Hirschig on this point, hear Riddell, Grote, Wyttenbach, Gaisford, Bekker, Geddes, Jebb, Heindorf and Stallbaum—and where are you? Precisely where you were. There is no finality, no truth, in such ‘learned’ disputation. My own view may be stated without reserve. The words between andros and dikaiotatou inclusive are quite definitely not an interpolation. The reason? Why, surely it is obvious. You cannot have an interpolation at the end of a work.
Very well. Leave aside the scholars, forget their hard clashing voices. Is ‘the world’ the mart of men—is that a garden of noumenal calm, is clarity, precision and finality the benign trefoil that therein grows? Alas, far from it. It is lies, turmoil, chaos, the mother mistaken for the daughter, wealth owned only by the unworthy, the clean of heart in jail, favourites inadequate, money lost, the reek of war stenching the spring. It is … (fans out yellow wax-like hands in deprecation) it is … heart-breaking.
Take for example the word ‘canny’. My dictionary endows it with a tortuous etymology based on the original meaning of ‘can’, i.e. know. cf. cunning. All that is a lie, of course. The word clearly comes from the Irish phrase ciall ceannaidhe (pro. keel canny) meaning shrewdness (of a businessman), i.e. the sort of worldly wisdom that is conferred by experience. Here then we have the wrong thing in the niche, the right thing unknown. (Blows nose.) Take even the pleas that persons in the grip of fear show the whites of their eyes. That too is wrong. That part of the eye is not white. See? (Places brown-black tobacco-charred finger on wizened eye-ball, pointing to diseased dull-yellow orbs, blood-flecked and afloat in glistening rheumy wash.) They are as you see quite yellow.
Take what is even a more extreme example. Inebriates, as a class, are despised (chiefly by people who cannot afford to drink) but a more particular derision is reserved for the inebriate’s idea that he can see, and has in fact seen pink rats. The incorrigible phenomenalism that is conferred by protracted and malignant sobriety makes the idea of pink rats laughable. But rats are pink. Of that there is of course no doubt whatever. (Roots in ‘coat’ pocket, pulls out huge squirming black rat, obviously native of Murmansk; the coarse heavy coat and scaly tail almost visibly swarming with bubonic germs.) You see? It looks black, even these razorsharp claws—see?—are black. (Rat whistles fiercely and snaps at captor.) But let us see. We must not be deceived by appearances, here or elsewhere. (Has suddenly plugged in electric razor, pinioned rat on knee and is deftly shaving it.) Now we are getting somewhere. Knowledge is vouchsafing us a glimpse at her treasures. See? The rat is pink. (Rat, plunging wildly, is held up by tail, seen to be half original size, completely devoid of hair, but pink.) There is therefore no aberration necessarily involved in the infra-fur inspection of rodents on the part of vinous zoologists. (Rat emits shrill venomous barks; shorn fur on floor begins to move nearer fire.) None whatever. We have nailed still a further lie and we have done perhaps enough for one day. (Rises, winks broadly, takes up wife’s handbag, opens it, stuffs in infuriated whistling rat, closes and replaces bag, which jumps about for a time). I will be in later on tonight if you wish to look in for a game of backgammon. Her nibs if you please is off to a temperance meeting in the Mansion House.
A NOTE in my diary says: ‘Ten to the power of seventy-nine. Write on this joke.’
Very well. Why not? I wish I had the money to finance real scientific research. You remember the worry we had back in the thirties (?this century, I think—or was it?) about the electron, how to determine its mass. Eddington had an amusing angle on the thing. But first let us recall the previous situation where you had the crude journeyman’s approach of calculating it as 10 (to the power of –27) of a gramme. Most of us looked on that as a sort of music-hall joke—mass audience reaction makes you snigger but you are not really amused, you are sorry for having forsaken for the evening your monogram on Cicero’s Pro Malony. Because it really boiled down to this—that if some smartie broke into the place at Sèvres and stole the so-called ‘standard kilogramme’ your ‘10 (to the power of –27)’ immediately became more obviously the arbitrary unfunny gaffe it essentially was. Very well. The ‘scientist’, in sum, had been deluding himself that the Heath Robinson experiments which led to that ‘discovery’ could be solemnly called observational determination. Whereas it is just make-believe and whimsy, all essentially feminine.
The ‘problem’—as one then thought of it—was to relate the mass of the electron to … to something real (like, for instance, sleep). The point, of course, about Eddington’s handling of the experiment was his realisation that it could only give information about a double wave system which ‘belonged’ as much to the electron as to the material comparison standard necessarily used. Very well.
To reach a result it had been necessary to investigate the circumstances where the double wave can be replaced with single waves (really, this sounds like barber-shop talk!)—or in other words, to examine the process where you are slipping from macroscopic to microscopic; call them ‘magnitudes’ by all means, terminology is unimportant. Eddington, as you know, tied this up with his engaging patent ‘comparison aether’, a retroambulant nonenity moping about introspectively way below the xx axis, whose mass can be calculated, needless to say, from a formula expressed largely in terms of the fundamental constants of macroscopical physics—the time-space radius, velocity of ‘light’ … and all the particles in the universe. Now when this mass is m and the
0
electric-particle- proton or electron, it doesn’t matter a damn which—is, as usual, m, you have this incredible quadratic:
10m − 136mm+m.=0
0
What is quite curious is that this new equation and formula for m
0
yield (for this velocity) a maximum value of 780 kilom. per sec. per megaparsec … which, of course, accords with the ‘value’ found by observation (!!!!!)
But here is what I am really getting at—the uniquely prolonged sneer that Eddington embodied in the paper he read to us at the Royal Society in the fateful autumn of ‘33.
‘In the maze of connection of physical constants,’ he said, ‘there remains just one pure number—’ (ho-ho-ho, I cannot help interjecting)—‘which is known only by observation and has no theoretical explanation. It is a very large number, about 10 (to the power of 79), and the present theory indicates that it is the number of particles in the universe. It may seem to you odd—’ (Not at all, not at all, one murmurs)—‘that this number should come into the various constants such as the constants of gravitation. You may say, how on earth can the number of particles in remote parts of the universe affect the Cavendish experiment on the attraction of metal spheres in a laboratory? I do not think they affect it at all. But the Cavendish and other experiments having given the result they did, we can deduce that space will go on and on, curving according to the mass contained in it until only a small opening remains and that the 10 (to the power of 79)th particle will be the last particle to be admitted through the last small opening and will shut the door after it.’
Bye-bye, 10 (to the power of 79).
Mind that step!
I HAVE BEEN INTERESTED in a newspaper report of a lecture given in Dublin recently by a Belfast medical man on the upright posture of man. ‘The lecturer said that that posture had been arrived at only in modern man. He showed that it had to be developed by each individual after birth …’ But not to all modern men does the upright posture come readily. I could give chapter and verse, name the man, the street and the time. I know plenty of … old-fashioned gents. Upright, is it? Never heard of it.
Scientists use words oddly. ‘Modern’ in the above context presumably means about 4000 B.C.; otherwise how could one explain the splayed ungainly feet that have been fashionable for some time. Is the world itself in existence so long? I doubt it and certainly hope not.
But surely it would be more to the point if scientists could explain why man born on the flat, thought fit to stand up. It is true that even the babies of today—one obviously cannot call them modern babies—have to develop the upright posture individually after birth. Presumably attempts to do this before birth were unsuccessful. In other words, all babies learn to walk. The remarkable thing is that they all succeed—or at all events those who fail are rarely seen out of doors in after life. In a way, it is all rather a pity. Man’s capacity for mischief certainly did not diminish when he stood up. Consider how the world would look today if he had remained on all fours. Everything would look flattened; houses would be a few feet in height, mahogany counters would be unknown, football would be unheard of, T.D.’s would fight for beds instead of seats, and if one of them managed to rise on a point of order he would be regarded as an acrobat rather than a statesman. And that vertical brawl, the stand-up fight, would be a thing of the future.
Yes, I agree. Not very funny.
TIME: Friday night.
Sets alarm clock for 3 a.m. Saturday morning, dresses hastily and cycles into town. Dismounts at Irish Times office, drenched to the skin. Obtains first copy of paper to come off press. Cycles home, pulls wife out of bed to make breakfast, then disappears into back room to study crossword puzzle. Thumbs dictionaries, almanacs, anthologies, thesauri. Begins to get odd words out one by one. Has breakfast. Goes back to work on puzzle. Is still working at it as day wears on. Claws at stubbly face, stares, lies back, grunts, walks to window and looks out. Gives sharp cry and writes down word. Paces room, hunches shoulders, has both cigarette and pipe going simultaneously. Dog yawns noisily, is kicked savagely in ribs. Another word comes. Rolls up trousers and examines knee. Lolls, protrudes denture on tip of tongue, rubs palms together violently. Cracks finger joints. Gives pop-eyed stare at wall, writes down another word. Pares finger nails. Removes slippers and socks and starts doctoring corn. Whistles The Lanty Girl. Writes down further word. Has lunch on tray, cannot leave room to have it properly. Sharpens pencil. Gets two words simultaneously. Keeps on and on and on.
Time: Saturday night.
Arrives at golf club clean, freshly shaved, with five half ones on board. Is approached by studious confrère.
Did you see the Times crossword today?
No. I didn’t see a paper at all today. What about it?
Well, it’s pretty stiff this week. (Produces paper.) I’ve spent hours at it and can’t get it out at all. Wasted the whole morning on it. I think some of the clues must be wrong.
I thought last week’s was easy enough.
You did? Well, look at this one. ‘Exhausted at reports,’ 9 letters. What could that be?
(Very slight pause.)
Um … PROSTRATE, I suppose.
Ohhh! (Sensation.) Begob, you’re quick at it. And 2 down here, five letters …
*Not my own joke, however.
*i.e. licensed drinkers (publisher’s note).
*i.e. Quidnunc, the name used by the Irish Times columnist.
*Such references (passim) indicated the editorial columns of the Irish Times.