Best of Myles

by Flann O'Brien

  By the way, Keats once had a female parrot which he called Tess. ‘Toujours la Polly Tess!’ he was wont to roar at her in his odder moments.

  About the Manet book, absorbing revelations will be as abundant in it as wrinkles in an elephant’s nose. The price will be very high. Watch this newspaper for further details. Or better, write to me for some information on the side. The jockey and the horse-trainer in me prefers to do business that way.

  If the castors on your Steinway piano are rusty and in poor condition, you should lubricate them.

  The Plain People of Ireland: With what?

  Myself: Castor oil, of course.

  Chopin’s Ballade in G minor, a great favourite with Beverley and myself, will then sound many times sweeter.

  Chopin, when moving, used to have his piano towed through the streets by a cart-horse while the composer was spread-eagled over the top of it playing downwards on the bumpy keys. This was no mean feat, because he had to use the wrong hand for the wrong side of the piano. Keats and Chopin had much in common; their work has the same sickly-sweet languor of disease, the same nachtschaft with night-forms, identical symbolosis of muscatel, the morning after the Christmas party in the workhouse. What are they carrying out now? A child’s coffin, mister, observe the pathetic dimensions of the thing. Aged two months and ten days. Born and reared on the premises. Ah well.

  TALENTED TENOR

  An excellent tenor whose records you can buy is Sidney MacEwen. He is a good man and sings some of our own songs with greater distinction than my dear friend, God bless him. By his name he must be a member of the Scottish nation. His voice is rich and easy and smooth and he uses it with the grace and competence of the true artist. Observe him in his record ‘She moved through the fair’ and ‘The lark in the clear air’. It is worth very much more than three shillings.

  The Plain People of Ireland: Look, this is very mixed up to-day.

  Myself: YWSK ryeamdklwo2&&J hu )O’&87! What do you think of that?

  The Plain People of Ireland: That’s worse.

  Myself: Then shut your gobbogue!

  I HAD intended that this column should appear today in glorious Technicolor but certain technical difficulties supervened. It is all rather difficult to explain without slides. Supposing I stand at the window here and close the shutters. We are then in darkness. Very good. But now I open the left-hand shutter. Light into the room.

  The Plain People of Ireland: Light into the room? Isn’t there a word left out there?

  Myself: There is indeed. The word ‘floods’. ‘Light floods into the room.’ By the way, do you mind if I put this explanation off to another time?

  The Plain People of Ireland: O not at all, it’s all right. What about a couple of good jokes?

  Myself: I will have you in stitches by and by. In the meantime listen to this. One of the morbid sub-human pretences adopted by Keltured idiocated Dubliners is that Georgian Dublin simply must be preserved do you hear me, I mean these marvellous façades, exquisite squares, the foot and the cavalry were here then, and 500 Dublin people made a good living making military unyforms at sixty pounds a time. Fitzwilliam Square was a blaze of lights, the grand old Whig nobility, gracious way of living, Grattan’s Parliament, the Beresfords lived here, stucco ceilings, classical iconography, civilisation, Gandon, Fwawnsees Johnston, Cassel, William Chambers, Ivory, Burlington, Cooley, fanlights, fenestration, the Wide Streets Commissioners, mellow old brickwork, observe how a century’s weathering has modulated the first bright plum-flush to wan wine-hues incomparably nice.

  Leave that shutter alone, when I close a shutter it is meant to be kept closed. But what are the facts about this Georgian ramp? I’ll tell you (they’ll get me for this but my public comes first) I’ll tell you the inside guts of it. Dublin is a slum. Dublin is a slum do you hear me. At its best (in Fitzwilliam Square) a well-preserved flat-riddled professional slum. At its worst (in Bride Street, the Liberties, Summerhill, Mountjoy Square) a sprawling dung-hill on stilts, giving off a constant odourless vapour of rancid, unwashable profit-rents. Ah yes, it is all real Dublin, the old crowd are the best, I was born in this house and my father before me was born here and his father before him faith. Aye. Old Dublin is so picturesque that you can smell its nostalgic charm when the mail boat is ten miles out coming in by Lambay (do you remember the time we had a picnic there in the old days, poor George was alive then). When I come back to Dublin after Paris, I feel I am near to tears. Tears are always near when one contemplates a work of great art like the Pan in the Dresdner Muckschule or the exquisite figures at Orvieto, or the second quartet by Bloch.

  Contemplate Little Britain Street bloch by bloch, Joe, and drop me a postcard telling me in your own words about the remote faded poignancy of elegant proportions, minute delicacy of architectural detail balanced against the rather charmingly squalid native persons who sort of provide a contrapuntal device in the aesthetic apprehension of the whole.

  The Plain People of Ireland: How about those jokes.

  Myself: Well wait till I see. Would you say that the cousin of the French Pretender is the Duc de Guise?

  The Plain People of Ireland: Whaa?

  Myself: And I wonder would he be annything to the Wild Geese?

  The Plain People of Ireland: Dear knows some people are very smart, these County Council scholarships to the universities above in Dublin do more harm than good, young gossoons walking around with their Sunday suits on them on week-days when they’re home at Easter, ashamed to be seen out with their fathers and O no thanks, I’m not going to give any hand with the sowing, I have to attend to me studies, I’ve an exam in two months. And that reminds me, I want five pounds for books. Sure it’s all madness. You say you’d like a joke or two for a bit of crack and the finger of scorn is pointed at you. It’s madness, the country’s in a right state. Madness. There’s no other word for it. Madness.

  SOME PERSON who has the time should set about making a collection of the fearfully-witty-I-mean-to-say pronouncements made about this country by immigrant scribes of one kind and another. One can almost smell the smugness, can almost hear oneself hoping that some of it will not drip down and stain the carpet. In a recent issue of ‘The Tablet’ Mr Christopher Hollis writes about being brought down and given a feed in Maynooth where everybody understands Latin, it’s all frightfully Irish to say the least of it. Then this:

  ‘I am told that the Irish are much better at English prose than they are at Irish prose. I cannot say if it is true, For there are very few people who can read Irish prose, and those that can read it can hardly ever read any other Irish prose than their own.’

  Mr Hollis once wrote an inaccurate book about Lenin. I am told he understands no Russian. I cannot say if it is true.

  ‘Thank heaven for the Film Society is all there is space to say of La Femme du Boulanger, sophisticated, witty, beautifully directed, acted and photographed.’ Irish Times Critic.

  You’re right, you’re right, shure there’s nothing like th’ oul French film, lovely stuff it is, you’d think you were in Paris where Maurice Chevalier comes from, bobbies with queer lookin’ caps on them an’ all.

  For years they have been talking on the upper-class well-bred-lines about der film als kunst, this Hollywood thing is well I mean to say it is all right if you like that sort of thing but it’s vulgar, old boy, it’s vulgar, it’s not Awrt. Look what they did to poor Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico. There was I mean an oeuvre which would show his telekinetic treatment of over-tonality at its fullest maturity in his new alert awareness of the sound-track, I mean to say everybody knows that the comparative structural simplicity of acoustical events makes them most suitable for controlled use in the highest orders of the Eisenstein montage hierarchy. And wot did they do? They gave it to Sol Lesser, damn me, to ‘edit’, called it Thunder Over Mexico! (Thing would be laughable were it not so tragic.)

  Yes. But the film is a great industry: it does not have to apologise to the unwashed uneducated artistic cl
asses, the madolescents and peterpan-jandrums for not being an art. Hollywood has brought up the best brains, the best technicians, the best cameramen and designers, the best actors in the world. When a good film is made, Hollywood makes it—and everyone can see that it’s good. It earns millions of dollars. (Ah that’s all right for you, I know the sort you are, but give me a private job that’s shot on faded sepia sixteen millimetre stock with non-professional actors, epileptic cameramen, no story and dialogue in French anny day of the week.)

  There is no reason in the world why a film should be addressed to a small clique; each film gives employment to armies of technical, sales and publicity people before it gets to the public and if it does that it must be better than the flickering fiddling avant-garde releases. In any event the film is merely spectacle and has nothing to do with what Mr Harris Tottle chatted about. (But try and prove that to the velvet daddy-long-legses with greasy hair.)

  The Plain People of Ireland: Another day gone and no jokes.

  Myself: Yes, curse you.

  I DO NOT suppose that there is a decent man within the four walls of Ireland who has not been annoyed by the publicity given to this stage coach gag. Self-respecting Irishmen (wherever they may be, on land, or sea or in the sky) will ask themselves what is the necessity for having, for instance, this horn-tooting business? It is colourful, you say. Colourful? And if you get half a chance you will undoubtedly come out with some old bit of chat about ‘these drab times’ and how ‘cheering’ the effect of ‘a bit of colour’ and (please don’t hurt me too much) ‘a bit of old-world romance’. Yes. I wonder in what baby’s newspaper you read that. COLOURFUL? Every time I hear the word ‘colourful’ I reach for my revolver.

  The Plain People of Ireland: Ah but shure ’tis grand, the old coaching days, you know, with the horn blowing and the scarlet coats and the ostlers and the potboys and the jars of hot punch inside in the pub. Shure it’s like ould times man.

  Myself: Aye, but could we not have Tom Mix or John Wayne galloping down from the Galtees and sticking up the coach with blunderbusses, your money or your life, throw out the bags of gold dust and put all your jewelry into that hat, nobody will get hurt unless—Oh no, you don’t—BANG! Bang-bang-bang! BANG! They’ve got me, Jake—look after Cis when I’m gone. BANG! Bang! Bang! Bang! Wheeeeee—plop! And the little flash of funny stuff, a bullet has punctured the flask of the card-sharper drunk (played by your old pal Joe Kerrigan) and the booze, more prized than life-blood, drips tragically into the fine burning sand. Bang, bang, bang! But what’s this—the clatter of a hundred hooves? They sweep into view with guns blazing—the Rangers! The Texas Rangers in the nick of time! The fearless Rangers, led by steel-faced Bill Boyd, otherwise known as Hopalong Cassidy.

  The Plain People of Ireland: Oh they’re saved, THEY’RE saved, Hurrah, good old Rangers!

  Indeed, Adare* is not the only place where the far-from-funny collapse of our transport services is regarded as a pretext for whimsy and jolly pranks with red coats. Side-splitting jokes are made on the subject in other places. Look at this tragic swathe of twaddle that appeared the other day in—yes—this newspaper.

  ‘Why not elephant and llama services, starting at the Pillar and running (or rather walking) to the nearer suburbs? Why not let the dromedary earn his keep? It might even be possible to run a special gala zebra-line to the current charity carnival.’

  Well, two can play at that game, two can do that withering funny-man act, two can kill the Irish Times readers with that class of stuff. I mean, it would be only right that these services should be named after the various districts served; one can visualise (with a special premature dodderer’s smirk) the Clonskeagh-Whitehallephant, the Ranellamagh, the Dun-dromedary and the elegant two-seater zebriolet (to Cabra or vice versa).

  Go further (and fare worse). Would a tram drawn by emus be emusing? It you had a small dray drawn by a hot flapping phoenix, would it be permissible under the traffic regulations to let the phoenix park? Fox-rides to Foxrock? Monkey-trots to Monkstown?

  Yes, it is a fine thing to make fun. But let the fun be gentle, gentle. Gentle and subtle. The world-weary and word-weary lips LaGiocondosely curved in tender amusement. Life is rather a lark, you knaow, fun is where you find it, humanity playing pitiful perspiring pranks and oozing with limp straw-coloured joy. But life remember has its sterner moments. The harvest, I mean, wheat, transport, economic holdings, an enlightened monetary policy and the Craobh Ruadh. We must work now and again, too, you know. Work is the man that will see us right at the latter end.

  CONSIDER the word wheat. By its nourishment wheat gives you heat. And in addition to heat, wheat gives you something to eat at t. Get it? Wheat, heat, eat, at t. W-h-e-a-t. Take away the first letter of wheat and you get heat. Then take away the first letter of heat and you get eat. Then take away the—

  The Plain People of Ireland: O fair enough! Good man, good man! It must be a desperate job thinking out things like that. Couldn’t see it at first. Smart boy wanted.

  Myself: I’m pretty deep, you know, sometimes.

  The Plain People of Ireland: O it’s very hard to be up to you be times, especially the days when you do have jawbreakers in the paper. Did you ever hear this one? What tongue is it that frequently hurts you but never speaks a word?

  Myself: I give up.

  The Plain People of Ireland: THE TONGUE OF YOUR SHOE!

  Myself: Ha-ha-ha, very good! Here’s one I’ll bet you don’t answer. What trade is that at which a man will succeed only by sticking it?

  The Plain People of Ireland (eagerly): What is it?

  Myself: Bill-posting.

  The Plain People of Ireland: O, HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! (Sounds of thousands of thighs being slapped and the creak of coarse country braces as the body bends double in writhes of mirth.)

  PEOPLE in my position get a queer view of life, as the cynical acrobat said when he was hanging upside down 200 feet from terra firma et incognita. I mean, people write to me. All classes of letters by every post. Can you tell me this or that? I can, of course. A Waterford lady tells me that her face is destroyed with freckles. Have I a remedy? I have. To remove freckles, take one ounce of lemon juice, a quarter of a drachm of powdered borax, and half a drachm of sugar. Mix and let stand for a few days in a glass bottle, then rub occasionally on the face and hands.

  And listen to this from a Casanova in Belmullet. ‘I am madly in love with eighteen girls and cannot make up my mind which of them to marry. Can you advise me?’

  I can faith. Marry the fat fair dumpy one.

  The Plain People of Ireland: How do you know there’s a fat fair dumpy one among them?

  Myself: How could you find a group of eighteen girls without a fair fat dumpy one among them?

  The Plain People of Ireland: Um.

  Myself: Sure didn’t I marry a fair fat dumpy one myself?

  The Plain People of Ireland: Did you? Any kids?

  Myself: Nine.

  The Plain People of Ireland: O fair enough.

  WHAT WOULD you do before you’d write—sorry—before you’d sit down and write this stuff?

  I’D ATE IT, D’YE HEAR ME, THAT’S WHAT I’D DO, I’D ATE IT FIRST.

  What is like what you always said?

  That the poor helps the poor.

  What will that be out of you?

  Enough.

  What condition may be said to be the prerequisite for a fine day?

  The condition that the rain keeps off.

  To what variable horizon can some people not be trusted?

  As far as you would throw them.

  What tribe has unique rights to the epithet finny?

  Your men the fish.

  Feathered?

  Your men the birds.

  Lost?

  Your men the Gaels.

  What is the sole and true badge of nationhood?

  The national language.

  Without what also would it be idle to seek to revive the national language.

 
Our distinctive national culture.

  The Plain People of Ireland: What is that you had up there about ‘finny’? Fish aren’t men, are they? Do you mean mermen?

  Myself: I was referring to the denizens of the deep.

  The Plain People of Ireland (very doubtfully): Is that the way? (Brightening up) Did you ever read round the world in eighty days by Jools Vern?

  Myself: I did faith.

  The Plain People of Ireland (enthusiastically): It’s very clever the way your man makes a bet to get round in eighty days and then he thinks he’s lost it, he’s done it in eighty-one, but then he comes along and discovers that he’s gained a day on the journey because of the Gulf Stream, you know, and the curvature of the earth and all the rest of it. He wins out in the latter end. Why don’t you sit down and write a book like that?

  Myself: For a very simple reason. I haven’t got a chair.

  The Plain People of Ireland: A chair?

  Myself: Yes, a chair. How could I sit down and write a book without having a chair to do the sitting on?

  The Plain People of Ireland: What happened all the chairs you had?

  Myself: Had to sell them, the only course compatible with honour. The rates, you know. Do you know the story about a certain college where they speak Latin and where the use of tobacco is strictly ta—

  Taboo.

  Yes. Well, this prefect comes along and sees a student with a lump in his cheek as if he was chewing a certain forbidden commodity. Quid est hoc? says the prefect. Hoc est quid, says the man, as quick to make a smart retort as the apocryphal character, the next. That joke dates from 1873. In what do I trust it keeps you?