The members of the Corporation are elected to discharge somewhat more physical tasks, such as arranging for slum clearance and the disposal of sewerage. Here there is scope for valuable public service, a vast field of opportunity confronts the eye. Why must the members trespass in other spheres where their intellectual equipment cannot be other than inadequate?
WHAT ONE might call the pathology of literature is a subject that a person with education and intelligence should examine. What prompts a sane inoffensive man to write? Assuming that to ‘write’ is mechanically to multiply communication (sometimes a very strong assumption, particularly when one writes a book about peasants in Irish) what vast yeasty eructation of egotism drives a man to address simultaneously a mass of people he has never met and who may resent being pestered with his ‘thoughts’? They don’t have to read what he writes, you say. But they do. That is, indeed, the more vicious neurosis that calls for investigation. The blind urge to read, the craving for print—that is an infirmity so deeply seated in the mind of today that it is (well-nigh) ineradicable. People blame compulsory education and Lord Northcliffe. The writer can be systematically discouraged, his ‘work’ can be derided and if all else fails we can (have recourse) to the modern remedy known as ‘liquidating the intellectuals’. But what can you do with the passive print addict? Absolutely nothing.
Consider the average day of the average man who is averagely educated. The moment he opens his eyes he reads that extremely distasteful and tragic story that is to be found morning after morning on the face of his watch. Late again. He is barely downstairs when he has thrown open (with what is surely the pathetic abandon of a person who knows he is lost) that grey tablet of lies, his newspaper. He assimilates his literary narcotic in silence, giving 5 per cent of his attention to the business of eating. His wife has ruined her sight from trying for years to read the same paper from the other side of the table and he must therefore leave it behind him as he departs for his work. Our subject is nervous on his way, his movements are undecided; he is momentarily parted from his drug. Notice how advertisements he has been looking at for twenty years are frenziedly scrutinised, the books and papers of neighbours on the bus are carefully scanned, the bus ticket is perused with interest, a fearful attempt is made to read what is printed on the tab of a glove held in the hand of a clergyman two seats up. Clocks are read and resented.
At last the office is reached. Hurrah! Thousands of documents—books, papers, letters, calendars, diaries, threats to sue, bailiffs’ writs. Writing, typescript, PRINT! An orgy of myopic indulgence! Consider the countless millions who sit all day in offices throughout the world endlessly reading each other’s writings! Ink-wells falling and falling in level as words are extracted from them by the hundred thousand! Tape-machines, type-writers, printing-presses wearing out their metal hearts to feed this monstrous lust for unspoken words!
And now consider that rare and delightful soul (admittedly he lives mostly in the Balkans)—the illiterate. Think of his quiet personal world, so untroubled by catastrophes, cures for heart disease, the fact that it is high-water at Galway at 2.31 p.m. or even the lamented death of a person who spoke Irish at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular! Recall the paragraph of a brother scribe of mine who saw a countryman ‘reading’ the morning paper upside down and remarking that there was another big one sunk as he gazed at an inverted battle-ship! Think of the illiterate’s acute observation of the real world as distinct from the pale print-interpreted thing that means life for most of us!
If you know such a person, leave him to his happiness. If you even hint he is unusual and has a ‘story’ he will probably start going to the tech. and eventually write a book, second 20th thousand now printing, the most naïf spiritual document of our times!
PEDANTIC old gentleman that I am, I received a lot of annoyance a few weeks ago and it is only now that I have stopped fuming that I can sit (down) and write about it (in cold blood). I look into that alien print, ‘The Sunday Times’, and see that my friend Desmond MacCarthy is discussing Mr Eliot’s latest thing, ‘Little Gidding’. Explaining the title of the book, Mr MacCarthy writes as follows:—
‘Little Gidding is, of course, the name of a lonely spot not far from Peterborough, where Nicholas Ferrar and his few followers in the reign of Charles I built a small plain chapel in which to worship undisturbed …’
Now in the whole underworld of print there is surely no more gratuitous or insulting phrase than that ‘of course’. Why ‘of course’? Probably there aren’t in the whole world more than a thousand people who had ever heard of Little Gidding and I resent, on my own behalf and on behalf of the civilised circle to which I belong, the suggestion that everybody is aware of this unimportant statistic. It’s like saying ‘Mr T S Eliot, of course, wears his boots when taking a bath.’
Then I throw away this foreign newspaper and take up something decent and native. In this month’s ‘Bell’ I am asked to accept as authoritative and penetrating an article on James Joyce. Throughout the piece the master’s last work is consistently referred to as ‘Finnegan’s Wake’. That apostrophe (I happen to know) hastened Mr Joyce’s end. To be insensitive to what is integral is, I fear, not among the first qualifications for writing an article on Mr Joyce.
Let there be no more of this nonsense.
HAVING CONSIDERED the matter in—of course—all its aspects, I have decided that there is no excuse for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and nearly always promulgates illusory concepts of life. But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable. Furthermore, poetry has the effect on the negligible handful who read it of stimulating them to write poetry themselves. One poem, if widely disseminated, will breed perhaps a thousand inferior copies. The same objection cannot be made in the case of painting or sculpture, because these occupations afford employment for artisans who produce the materials. Moreover, poets are usually unpleasant people who are poor and who insist forever on discussing that incredibly boring subject, ‘books’. You will notice above that I used the phrase ‘illusory concepts of life’. If you examine it carefully you will find that it is quite meaningless but since when did such a trifle matter? Poets don’t matter and an odd senseless bit of talk matters little either. What is important is food, money, and opportunities for scoring off one’s enemies. Give a man those three things and you won’t hear much squawking out of him.
In a violent article in a contemporary, Mr P. S. O’Hegarty assails the ‘philosophy’ behind the Beveridge Plan. He sees in it a plan to maintain the dissolute, the lazy and the work-shy at the expense of the industrious. He denounces such a term as ‘the right to work’ as jargon, and says that what it meant is ‘the necessity for working’. There is much sense in this view. In the present century we have amassed a formidable list of ‘rights’ never heard of before. I think it is true to say that only an inferior person has rights. When you hear a person talking about his rights, you may be sure he is trying to gain by dint of shouting something which he lacks (or had and lost) by reason of some culpable deficiency in himself. You never hear successful men talking about their rights.
LAST SUNDAY evening I pulled over a chair and took from the top of the wardrobe the old cardboard box, opened it and pulled out the claw-hammer, complete with ball-buttoned black waistcoat as worn at the Vice-regal Ball in nineteen O seven. How my old ball-dancing days surged back through the fug of lavender and mothballs. I tried one of the pockets. An old programme, Gaiety Theatre, 18th June, 1911, Martin Harvey in ‘Proserpine’s Folly’. I cannot remember the play or the man. The theatre, I’m told, is still there. One recalls that debased French drug addict of bygone revolution days, ‘Neiges’ Dantan.
In no time I had stuffed myself into the ‘suit’ and was speeding downtown in a taxi, clutchin
g my miniature scores. (I don’t know why—I nearly wrote ‘miniature sores’ there.) Into the large, crowded hall to hear our Gaelic radio orchestra being thoroughly well conducted by Mr Constant Lambert, distinguished visitor. Interesting programme, the usual sweetbreads relieved by the Tchaikovsky Symphony No 5 and a piece by Glazunoff. Relieved in the wrong way, however, because I dislike both works, and cannot see what Mr Lambert admires in them. Back in my library a bit depressed, I administer simultaneous enteric and mental stimuli by drinking French brandy and reading bits from Mr Lambert’s well-known book, ‘Music Ho’. Seems he agrees with me about Tchaikovsky:
‘But for the typical nineteenth-century symphony as represented by Tchaikovsky No 5 … there is frankly nothing to be said; the mingling of academic procedure with undigested nationalism or maudlin sentiment, or both, produces a chimerical monster, a musical Minotaur that fortunately has had no progeny …’
As to Glazunoff, ‘Glazunoff … relapsed into premature middle age, producing a series of well-wrought symphonies whose (sic) occasional touches of national colour only throw into greater prominence the conservatoire qualities of the rest of the work.’
It is interesting to have a conductor certifying in writing that his programme is largely trash, but I am not so sure that any notice will be taken by this nation of befuddled paddies, whose sole musical tradition is bound up with blind harpers, tramps with home-made fiddles, Handel in Fish-handel street, John McCormack praising our airport, and no street in the whole capital named after John Field.
From music, one passes to musical criticism and criticism generally. At present, one of the Dublin newspapers sends a young countryman to review plays, with results that may be imagined—and even read from time to time. Here is a true story arising from a comparable situation obtaining in the days of the Freeman’s Journal. Some poor old man who was good at funerals, police courts and the like was sent by accident to review a recital by Paderewski. When he was seen in the theatre, the management became alarmed. After considering the problem, they invited him into a back room, gave him a few drinks, explained that music was rather a bore and promised to let him have a reasoned and technical review of the whole programme, nicely typed out, to save his time and trouble. The reporter was very thankful, and in due course went back to his office with one of the best-informed notices ever written in his pocket. He was about to send it in when he felt that some little comment of his own was called for to make the thing look genuine. He added the following as a last paragraph:
‘Mr Paderewski gave a musicianly rendition of the above items, and was observed to play with equal facility on the black notes as the white.’
THE WRITING crowd, it is well known, are only a parcel of dud czechs and bohemian gulls and if I am seen in that notorious ultimate rigour it will not be in their company, though I can predict that on that day there will be wailed throughout the length (not to say breadth) of this rich and rare land loud cries of ‘Wisha, he wasn’t the worst!’ (Bah, if I may say so, omnia post obitum fingit maiora vetustas or if I have not made myself Cleary—maius ab exsequiis nomen in ora venit.)
It was the very same with the other crowd. That fellow la Fontaine that made a stack out of translating Father Peter’s Aesoip A Tháinic go hEirinn, do you know that that chancer was never in his life known to have asked a pal if he had a mouth on him. (And that would be a nice remark to make to a man that was afflicted with vampires, eh?) O yes, that’s known—that’s well-known. And do you remember that other party that put French on a lot of Lady Gregory’s stuff—Francis Villyan? Villyan was a narky character. He once spent a day out with la Fontaine. Then straight home in a rage and wrote the piece beginning, je meurs de seuf aupres de la Fontaine chault comme feu, et tremble dent a dent …
Now here is an astonishing thing that will please a certain type of reader never mind what type. Consider these four words, which convey between them the whole picture of the last war.
KAISER
SERBIA
JOFFRE
FRENCH
Now take out your pen (a pencil will do also, of course) and draw a vertical line through the middle of the words. Now if you read down each half, you will get precisely the same words that you get across. Get it?
And now, back to our eternal French. Somebody ‘reviewing’ something here some Saturdays ago wrote as follows: ‘A misinterpretation of a passage (cited) from Valéry’s “Ebauche d’un Serpent”, a misquotation … and Laforgue’s name twice mis-spelt are some of the minor pleasures which this work will afford the pedant …’
I haven’t any of Mr V’s poems by me as I write, chiefly because it looks so damn silly hauling a bookcase into a pub, but unless I am Miss Teaken, the Ebauche kicks off like this:
Parmi l’arbre la brise berce
La vipère que je vêtis;
Un sourire, que la dent perce,
Et qu’elle éclaire d’appétits,
Sur le jardin se risque et rode,
Et mon triangle d’émeraude
Tire sa langue à double fil.
And that’s only the first verse. Can you imagine the sneering daredevils who despise each other for not ‘understanding’ grey incomprehensibilities like this? As for Laforgue, I believe the correct way to spell his name is E-L-I-O-T. Give me at all times the stern logicacity of the German muse (lately polluted, I am told, by a wretch called Rilke) which won’t stand for any nonsense or ‘difficulty’ and can be read even by those who have only B.A. German.
Hat alles seine Zeit.
Das Nähe wird weit,
Das Wärme wird kalt,
Der Junge wird alt,
Das Kälte wird warm,
Der Reiche wird arm,
Der Narre gescheit,
Alles zu seiner Zeit.
Not to mention, of course, that der Myles wird müde, if I may make a personal observation in my chaste Göthe syntax.
I AM, of course, intensely interested in education. I have every reason to be because I was disabled for life at the age of fifteen by a zealous master (although I had the laugh on him afterwards when I came back from hospital with my two hands amputated). When I was taking a bath last night (fearful job disconnecting the taps and getting the thing out through the window) I found some bits of paper, blue and gamgee coloured, lying about the floor. They were examination papers—indeed, they probably still are. They told me clearly that my suspicions were correct—my father, secretly rather a social climber, I fear, is doing the Leaving. He, poor fellow, is a rich man and believes (a) that ‘education’ is something rather pleasant and (b) that it can be acquired by doing the Leaving. Neither of these propositions, of course, is tenable, never mind what Tierney says.
Education—greedy eggs pair toe—is (using the term in its real sense) what has unfitted me for the drapery trade, what makes me sneer at money, reject the physical ‘beauty’ of the world as meretricious and seek the community of quiet minds in disputation on the Greek style of this or that departed heresiarch—knowing well that terrestrial time cannot be better spent. It is not, I protest, the cynical arrangement which contemplates timely regurgitation in the summer examination hall of gargantuan scholastic gluttonies supervised in winter by men with whips and clubs, even if this process guarantees that one will emerge a Boy Messenger Grade III, increasing by annual increments to £95 at the age of 70. I have looked at these examination papers and the beliefs implied by them are genuinely embarrassing, even to my equable lordship.
Perhaps the English Honours Paper best illustrates what I am trying to say, and saying (in my own way). It is not so much that the student is expected to be familiar with the works of very many inferior persons, for after all what else is literature but just this? What is disquieting and cannot be borne is that one is expected to admire or decry these things and that one will obtain marks and consequently be considered educated only in so far as one’s admiration and contempt corresponds with those of the person who sets the paper (who is of course entitled to his opi
nions but not necessarily to those of other people).
Listen to this, will you: Describe with quotation, the famous long simile at the end of ‘The Scholar Gypsy’. What do you see to admire in it? The question is not asked ironically and you’ll never be a Subordinate Writing Clerk, Grade 5b, if you answer it in that spirit. What do you see to admire in it? Elsewhere in the same paper I see the phrase Say more particularly what you find to admire in it. An eccentric student who admires rather than finding or seeing to admire would probably be expelled from the examination hall (with ignominy). I suppose it’s too much reading of the French that causes English like that to be written.
Appreciate Ruskin as a describer of the richly splendid and the desolate. Leave aside the tautology of ‘richly splendid’ and tell me why any educated person should know anything whatever of this awful little blue-nosed schoolboy whose smugness and ignorance were so appalling that he would be admitted to nowhere except girls’ schools for the delivery of his ‘lectures’. Why should young people who have done no harm be compelled to ‘appreciate’ this unthinkable alien with the elastic-sided boots and the stomach full of home-made custard?
Later on, in the pathology section, we get this: Why does the poet pray to be made one with the West Wind? For that matter why do I take damn good care not to walk on the cracks in the pavement? Why does my wife fall out of the bed four times every night every July? Really, who wants to know the answers to these essentially Viennese questions?
I shall say nothing of the remaining questions. They are concerned with names which, being a modern person, I have never heard before—Wardsworth, Milltone, Bruening, William Bleck—I quote from memory. It amuses me to think that any schoolboy who shares my lordship’s perfectly reasonable ignorance of these people will fail the examination and go through life as a person who is not ‘educated’. Excuse me while I blow my nose.
Best of Myles Page 26
