Best of Myles

by Flann O'Brien

CHAPMAN once fell in love and had not been long plying his timid attentions when it was brought to his notice that he had a rival. This rival, a ferocious and burly character, surprised Chapman in the middle of a tender conversation with the lady and immediately challenged him to a duel, being, as he said, prohibited from breaking him into pieces there and then merely by the presence of the lady.

  Chapman, who was no duellist, went home and explained what had happened to Keats.

  ‘And I think he means business,’ he added. ‘I fear it is a case of “pistols for two, coffee for one”. Will you be my second?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Keats said, ‘and since you have the choice of weapons I think you should choose swords rather than pistols.’

  Chapman agreed. The rendezvous was duly made and one morning at dawn Keats and Chapman drove in a cab to the dread spot. The poet had taken the ‘coffee for one’ remark rather too literally and had brought along a small quantity of coffee, sugar, milk, a coffee-pot, a cup, saucer and spoon, together with a small stove and some paraffin.

  After the usual formalities, Chapman and the rival fell to sword-play. The two men fought fiercely, edging hither and thither about the sward. Keats, kneeling and priming the stove, was watching anxiously and saw that his friend was weakening. Suddenly, Chapman’s guard fell and his opponent drew back to plunge his weapon home. Keats, with a lightning flick of his arm took up the stove and hurled it at the blade that was poised to kill! With such force and aim so deadly was the stove hurled that it smashed the blade in three places. Chapman was saved!

  The affair ended in bloodless recriminations. Chapman was warm in his thanks to Keats.

  ‘You saved my life,’ he said, ‘by hurling the stove between our blades. You’re tops!’

  ‘Primus inter parries,’ Keats said.

  KEATS AND CHAPMAN once called to see a titled friend and after the host had hospitably produced a bottle of whiskey, the two visitors were called into consultation regarding the son of the house, who had been exhibiting a disquieting redness of face and boisterousness of manner at the age of twelve. The father was worried, suspecting some dread disease. The youngster was produced but the two visitors, glass in hand, declined to make any diagnosis. When leaving the big house, Chapman rubbed his hands briskly and remarked on the cold.

  ‘I think it must be freezing and I’m glad of that drink,’ he said. ‘By the way, did you think what I thought about that youngster?’

  ‘There’s a nip in the heir,’ Keats said.

  CHAPMAN was much given to dreaming and often related to Keats the strange things he saw when in bed asleep. On one occasion he dreamt that he had died and gone to heaven. He was surprised and rather disappointed at what he saw for although the surroundings were most pleasant, there seemed to be nobody about. The place seemed to be completely empty and Chapman saw himself wandering disconsolately about looking for somebody to talk to. He suddenly woke up without solving this curious puzzle.

  ‘It was very strange,’ he told Keats. ‘I looked everywhere but there wasn’t a soul to be seen.’

  Keats nodded understandingly.

  ‘There wasn’t a sinner in the place,’ he said.

  KEATS AND CHAPMAN met one Christmas Eve and fell to comparing notes on the Christmas present each had bought himself. Keats had bought himself a ten glass bottle of whiskey and paid thirty shillings for it in the black market.

  ‘That is far too dear,’ Chapman said. ‘Eighteen shillings is plenty to pay for a ten glass bottle.’

  Chapman then explained that he had bought a valuable Irish manuscript, one of the oldest copies of the Battle of Ventry, or Cath Fionntragha. He explained that the value of the document was much enhanced by certain interlineal Latin equivalents of obscure Irish words.

  ‘How many such interlineal comments are there?’ Keats asked.

  ‘Ten,’ Chapman said.

  ‘And how much did you pay for this thing?’ Keats asked.

  ‘Forty-five shillings,’ Chapman said defiantly.

  ‘Eighteen shillings is plenty to pay for a ten gloss battle,’ Keats said crankily.

  KEATS once tried to collar the Christmas card trade in pretty mottoes. He bought a quantity of small white boards and got to work burning philosophical quotations on them with a tiny poker. Festina Lente, Carpe Diem and Dum Spiro Spero, were produced in great numbers. Becoming more ambitious, the poet showed Chapman a board bearing the words Proximus Ardet Ucalegon.

  ‘One does not like to be captious,’ Chapman said, ‘but I’m afraid there’s a word left out there.’

  Keats looked at the board again.

  ‘You want Jam on it,’ he said.

  WHILE KEATS and Chapman were at Heidelberg arranging for the purchase of cheap doctorates, the latter conceived a violent, wholly mysterious attachment for a practically supernumerary lecturer in Materia Med., by name Jakob Arnim-Woelkus, an incredible bore and a man wanting in the meanest of personal accomplishments. Chapman never wearied of this person’s company and in his absence, was for ever retailing the ‘pleasantries’ and sophisms of the deplorable bore. Keats, who could not bear this, kept out of his compatriot’s way as much as possible. Late in term, however, Keats, to heal the scars he had received in a duel, went walking into the mountains and persuaded Chapman to accompany him, fearing less the devil he knew than any foreigner. The two walked for hours, Keats gloomy, Chapman meditative. Not a word was exchanged till eventually they came to the brow of a hill whence a fine landscape was to be seen. Chapman, moved, spoke, student-wise, in dog-Latin: Ah, Keats! Hic utinam nunc sit Jacobus Arnim-Woelkus, doctor praeclarissimus noster! Keats snarled, Odi, he roared, odi Prof. Arnim-Woelkus!

  KEATS had a nephew who evinced, even in early childhood, an unusual talent for manufacturing spurious coins. At the age of twelve he was already in the habit of making his own pocket money. His parents were poor and could not procure for him the tuition that would enable him to proceed from the science of penny-making to the more intricate and remunerative medium of work in silver. The boy’s attempts at making half-crowns were very poor indeed and on one occasion resulted in the father being presented with six months hard labour by a local magistrate. Keats, who was in reduced circumstances and could not offer any help himself, put the problem before Chapman, who was in tow with a wealthy widow. The widow was induced to give £100 to have the boy educated. Six months after the money had been given over and a tutor found, Keats and Chapman visited the boy’s home to see what progress was being made. They found the boy in his workshop engrossed in the production of a very colourable half-crown, working with meticulous industry on what was a very life-like representation of his late majesty, King Edward. To Keats, Chapman expressed satisfaction at the improvement in the boy’s skill.

  ‘I think he is making excellent progress,’ he said.

  ‘He is forging ahead,’ Keats said.

  ONCE CHAPMAN, in his tireless quest for a way to get rich quick, entered into a contract with a London firm for the supply of ten tons of swansdown. At the time he had no idea where he could get this substance, but on the advice of Keats went to live with the latter in a hut on a certain river estuary where the rather odd local inhabitants cultivated tame swans for the purposes of their somewhat coarsely-grained eggs. Chapman erected several notices in the locality inviting swan-owners to attend at his hut for the purpose of having their fowls combed and offering ‘a substantial price’ per ounce for the down so obtained, Soon the hut was ssurounded by gaggles of unsavoury-looking natives, each accompanied by four or five disreputable swans on dog-leads. The uproar was enormous and vastly annoyed Keats, who was in bed with toothache. Chapman went out and addressed the multitude and then fell to bargaining with individual owners. After an hour in the pouring rain he came in to Keats, having apparently failed to do business. He was in a vile temper.

  ‘Those appalling louts!’ he exploded. ‘Why should I go out and humiliate myself before them, beg to be allowed to comb their filthy swans, get soaked to
the skin bargaining with them?’

  ‘It’ll get you down sooner or later,’ Keats mumbled.

  A MILLIONAIRE collector (whose name was ever associated with that old-time Irish swordsman of France, O’Shea d’Ar) once invited Chapman and Keats to dinner. The invitation came quite at the wrong time for Keats, who was crippled with stomach trouble. Chapman insisted, however, that the poet should come along and endeavour to disguise his malady, holding that millionaires were necessarily personable folk whose friendship could be very beautiful. Keats was too ill to oppose Chapman’s proposal and in due course found himself in a cab bound for the rich man’s bounteous apartments. On arrival Chapman covered up his friend’s incapacity by engaging the host in loud non-stop conversations and also managed to have Keats placed at an obscure corner of the table where little notice would be taken of him. Slumped in his chair, the unfortunate poet saw flunkeys deposit course after course of the richest fare before him but beyond raking his knife and fork through the food in desultory attempts to make a show of eating, he did not touch it. When the main course was served—a sight entirely disgusting to the eye of Keats—Chapman and the host were in the middle of a discussion on rare china. The host directed that a valuable vase on the mantelpiece should be passed round to the guests for inspection. Chapman gave a most enthusiastic dissertation on it, identifying it as a piece of the Ming dynasty. He then passed it to Keats, who was still slumped over his untouched platter of grub. The poet had not been following the conversation and apparently assumed that Chapman was trying to aid him in his extremity. He muttered something about the vase being ‘a godsend’ and after a moment handed it to the flunkey to be replaced on the mantelpiece. On the way home that evening Chapman violently reproached his friend for not making a fuss about the vase and pleasing the host.

  ‘I saw nothing very special about it,’ Keats said.

  ‘Good heavens man,’ Chapman expostulated, ‘it was a priceless Ming vase, worth thousands of pounds! Why didn’t you at least say nothing if you couldn’t say something suitable?’

  ‘I’m afraid I put my food in it,’ Keats said.

  CHAPMAN once called upon Keats seeking advice on a delicate matter. It appears that he had accompanied his eldest son to a school cricket match. In the course of the day, Chapman found himself without cigarettes, and was told that the nearest shop was ten miles away. He took the obvious course of making his way to the visitors’ cloakroom, which was then deserted, and carefully went through the pockets of the guests’ overcoats. His haul amounted to about seven packets and contentedly he went back to watch the play. A rather ironical thing happened the following day. The Headmaster wrote to Chapman to say that Chapman’s son was strongly suspected of having pilfered from guests’ overcoats on the day of the match and that the question of expulsion was under consideration. What was Chapman to do? That was the question he posed Keats.

  Keats advised that Chapman should reply saying that he had personally witnessed another boy going through the coats; that he did not care to reveal this boy’s identity but that in view of his own carelessness in not reporting the matter, he for his part would penalise himself to the extent of replacing all the missing property.

  Chapman accepted this suggestion.

  ‘I hope it will work,’ he said. ‘I believe there is a very bad atmosphere in the school since this happened.’

  ‘It will clear the heir,’ Keats said.

  KEATSIANA

  Keats was once presented with an Irish terrier, which he humorously named Byrne. One day the beast strayed from the house and failed to return at night. Everybody was distressed, save Keats himself. He reached reflectively for his violin, a fairly passable timber of the Stradivarius feciture, and was soon at work with chin and jaw.

  Chapman, looking in for an after-supper pipe, was astonished at the poet’s composure, and did not hesitate to say so. Keats smiled (in a way that was rather lovely).

  ‘And why should I not fiddle,’ he asked, ‘while Byrne roams?’

  CHAPMAN once became immersed in the study of dialectical materialism, particularly insofar as economic and sociological planning could be demonstrated to condition eugenics, birth-rates and anthropology. His wrangles with Keats lasted far into the night. He was particularly obsessed by the fact that in the animal kingdom, where there was no self-evident plan of ordered Society and where connubial relations were casual and polygamous, the breed prospered and disease remained of modest dimensions. Where there was any attempt at the imposition from without—and he instanced the scientific breeding of race-horses by humans—the breed prospered even more remarkably. He was not slow to point out that philosophers of the school of Marx and Engels had ignored the apparent necessity for ordered breeding on the part of humans as a concomitant to planning in the social and economic spheres. Was this, he once asked Keats, to be taken as evidence of superior reproductive selection on the part of, say, horses—or was it to be taken that a man of the stamp of Engels deliberately shirked an issue too imponderable for rationative evaluation?

  The poet found this sort of thing boring, and frowned.

  ‘Foals rush in where Engels feared to tread,’ he said morosely.

  (READERS ARE warned that this is extra special; if you don’t get it, you probably have a permanent cold in the head—high up.)

  Keats and Chapman were entrusted by the British Government with a secret mission which involved a trip to India. A man-of-war awaited them at a British port. Leaving their lodgings at dawn, they were driven at a furious pace to the point of embarkation. When about to rush on board, they encountered at the dockside a mutual friend, one Mr Childs, who chanced to be there on business connected with his calling of wine-importer. Perfunctory and very hasty courtesies were exchanged; Keats and Chapman then rushed on board the man-of-war, which instantly weighed anchor. The trip to India was made in the fastest time then heard of, and as soon as the ship had come to anchor in Bombay harbour, the two friends were whisked to land in a wherry. Knowing that time was of the essence of their mission, they hastened from the docks into the neighbouring streets and on turning a corner, whom should they see only—

  Mr Childs? No.

  Just a lot of Indians, complete strangers.

  ‘Big world,’ Keats remarked.

  IN THEIR LEANER days Keats and Chapman were reduced to making a living in the halls. Chapman had invented a fortune-telling device operated by a 1 h.p. electric motor. He called this machine ‘The X-Ray Eye’. It was—as were most baffling gadgets in those days—worked with mirrors. Inside the ‘electric eye’ was set a very strong electric bulb which cast, through the lenses of the ‘eye’ a penetrating shaft of light through the darkened auditorium. Inside the eye and opposite the machine was a little screen upon which various character-reading words such as ‘GENEROUS’, ‘WARM-HEARTED’, ‘BRAINY’ could be made to appear one at a time by the mere turn of a handle. By manipulating the handle and turning the universally-jointed eye hither and thither about the auditorium, Chapman could make the magnified reflection of these mottoes appear in blazing letters on the chests of members of the audience. Naturally the words were altered to suit the taste of local audiences. It was Keats’ task to attend to this but on one occasion he neglected to make the change with the result that the unsuspecting Chapman appeared one night before a refined London audience with mottoes which had been in use in Lancashire. First time the ‘eye’ fixed on a most respectable captain of industry, who saw—to a horror that was no less than Chapman’s—that the word ‘DRUNKARD’ was engraved by the ‘eye’ on his boiled shirt. The outraged citizen leaped to his feet, shook his fist at Chapman, protested furiously, and began to call for the manager. The situation was saved by Keats.

  ‘He’s casting no reflections on you,’ he called out from a box.

  CHAPMAN once laid out the entire savings of himself and his friend Keats on a pedigree bull. He also beggared nine weak-minded relatives on the purchase of a vast farm for the grazing of this animal, w
ho was expected to repay all the money laid out on him within a year and with such additional profit as would enable Keats and Chapman to emigrate to America. After nine months Keats was incarcerated in respect of unpaid fodder bills and Chapman had gone into hiding for similar reasons. The bull merely ate everything before him, gored several yardmen and did not bring in one penny towards his keep. Chapman at length contrived to visit the jailed Keats in disguise in order to discuss the disastrous pass to which things had come. He found the poet in a vile temper.

  ‘I think,’ Chapman said lamely, ‘that that animal will have to be extirpated.’

  ‘You had better eradicate the whole wretched project,’ Keats said acidly, ‘brute and ranch.’

  Chapman bit his lip.

  CHAPMAN on one occasion was commissioned by an enormously wealthy business man to advise on wall-papers for the state-rooms of a yacht then building. The millionaire was however unbelievably busy and could talk to Chapman only in his luxurious car on the ten-minute journey between mansion and office. At first Chapman, being well paid for his pains, did not mind this exiguous procedure but as time passed a number of unknown advisers on other matters were picked up at various corners so that on some mornings the car was packed with up to eight people simultaneously giving the fur-coated boss very expensive advice. This amazed Chapman enormously, as he was failing completely to make himself heard on wall-paper schemes. The last straw was provided one morning when the car, packed to the roof with babbling experts, was joined by a mysterious lawyer, who stood outside on the running board of the racing vehicle pouring advice in through the window. This happened several mornings in succession, and Chapman eventually complained bitterly to Keats.