Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien (Irish Literature)

by Flann O'Brien

  To go back to the city: it appears that the poor man does not always go straight home at ten o’clock. If his thirst is big enough and he knows the knocking formula, he may possibly visit some house where the Demand Note of the Corporation has stampeded the owner into a bout of illicit after-hour trading. For trader and customer alike, such a life is one of excitement, tiptoe, and hush. The boss’s ear, refined to shades of perception far beyond the sensitiveness of any modern aircraft detector, can tell almost the inner thoughts of any policeman in the next street. At the first breath of danger all lights are suddenly doused and conversation toned down, as with a knob, to vanishing point. Drinkers reared in such schools will tell you that in inky blackness stout cannot be distinguished in taste from Bass and that no satisfaction whatever can be extracted from a cigarette unless the smoke is seen. Sometimes the police make a catch. Here is the sort of thing that is continually appearing in the papers:

  Guard —— said that accompanied by Guard —— he visited the premises at 11.45 P.M. and noticed a light at the side door. When he knocked the light was extinguished, but he was not admitted for six minutes. When defendant opened eventually, he appeared to be in an excited condition and used bad language. There was nobody in the bar but there were two empty pint measures containing traces of fresh porter on the counter. He found a man crouching in a small press containing switches and a gas-meter. When he attempted to enter the yard to carry out a search, he was obstructed by the defendant, who used an expression. He arrested him, but owing to the illness of his wife, he was later released.

  Defendant—Did you give me an unmerciful box in the mouth?

  Witness—No.

  Defendant—Did you say that you would put me and my gawm of a brother through the back wall with one good haymaker of a clout the next time I didn’t open when you knocked?

  Witness—No.

  Justice—You look a fine block of a man yourself. How old are you?

  Defendant—I’m as grey as a badger, but I’m not long past forty. (Laughter.)

  Justice—Was the brother there at all?

  Defendant—He was away in Kells, your worship, seeing about getting a girl for himself. (Laughter.)

  Justice—Well, I think you could give a good account of yourself.

  Witness—He was very obstreperous, your worship.

  Witness, continuing, said that he found two men standing in the dark in an outhouse. They said they were there “for a joke.” Witness also found an empty pint measure in an outdoor lavatory and two empty bottles of Cairnes.

  Defendant said that two of the men were personal friends and were being treated. There was no question of taking money. He did not know who the man in the press was and did not recall having seen him before. He had given strict instructions to his assistant to allow nobody to remain on after hours. There was nobody in the press the previous day as the gas-man had called to inspect the meter. The two Guards had given him an unmerciful hammering in the hall. His wife was in ill-health, necessitating his doing without sleep for three weeks. A week previously he was compelled to send for the Guards to assist in clearing the house at ten o’clock. He was conducting the house to the best of his ability and was very strict about the hours.

  Guard —— said that the defendant was a decent hard-working type but was of an excitable nature. The house had a good record.

  Remarking that the defendant seemed a decent sort and that the case was distinguished by the absence of perjury, the justice said he would impose a fine of twenty shillings, the offence not to be endorsed. Were it not for extenuating circumstances he would have no hesitation in sending the defendant to Mountjoy for six months. He commended the Guards for smart police work.

  Not many publicans, however, will take the risk. If they were as careful of their souls as they are of their licences, heaven would be packed with those confidential and solicitous profit-takers and, to please them, it might be necessary to provide an inferior annex to paradise to house such porter-drinkers as would make the grade.

  Slattery’s Sago Saga

  OR

  From Under the Ground to the Top of the Trees

  [An unfinished novel by Flann O’Brien, c.1964–66]

  PART ONE

  1

  “A bleeding Scotchman, by gob!”

  Tim Hartigan said the words out loud as he finished the letter and half turned in his chair to look at Corny, who lifted his head sideways and seemed to roll his eyes.

  Tim was wise in a Timmish way. It had perhaps not been wise to have stuffed the letter into his back pocket five days earlier and forgotten about it but that was because he was not used to getting letters and anyway he had been on his way to feed the pigs when Ulick Slattery, the postman, handed it to him. On this morning a strange enlightenment made him think of it and it was wise of him, when he pulled it out at breakfast, to examine first the stamp and postmark very carefully. Yes, it read Houston, Texas, U.S.A. It was also correct of him when he tore the letter open to look at the end of it immediately, to verify that it was from Ned Hoolihan.

  Abstractedly, before reading it he had propped the letter against the handsome pewter milk jug and from the little rack of solid silver with 22-carat gold filigree (an article thought to be Florentine), he picked a slice of dry toast, generously buttered it, and rammed a piece between his solid nerveless molars. He lifted his cup of blackish tea and swallowed with echoing gulps. His bland life, he suddenly feared, was about to be disturbed. Could he handle this stranger?

  Tim Hartigan, left an orphan at the age of two by his widowed mother, had been adopted when he was four by the high-minded Ned Hoolihan whose cousin, Sister M. Petronilla, was Mother Abbess at the Dominican Home of the Holy Refuge at Cahirfarren. Hoolihan had taken a fancy to the little boy, and that was all about it. He was a wealthy man and brought his new prize home with his baggage to his mansion, Poguemahone Hall. And himself ever of plain habits he had sent Tim not to a college but to the local National School, with a housekeeper at the Hall to look after the boy’s other needs.

  Before returning to Tim that morning and his letter, it is right to add here a little more about Ned Hoolihan. His money had been mostly inherited as a result of a fortune his father had amassed from automotive and petrol-engine inventions. Indeed, it was a family tradition that Constantine Hoolihan, B.E., had been shamelessly swindled by Henry Ford I but that, through his invention of a primitive computer nourished with a diet of stock-market minutiae, the resourceful engineer from Bohola, Mayo, had managed to get together a sum even bigger than that of which he had been deprived. His only son Ned did not follow this example of thinking out new things, machines, devices, fresh ways of mechanically alleviating the human lot: he was serious, studious, took an early interest in the countryside, God’s opulent extemporising, and the great mystery of Agriculture. His doctorate at Dublin University was won on a dissertation (never published) entitled The Stratification of Alkaline Humus, thought to be a system of providing natural fertiliser through the deliberate cultivation of fields of weeds for the production of compost and silage, a scheme of tillage in which stray growths of wheat or leek or turnip would be a noxious intrusion.

  When he bought Poguemahone Hall, a late Norman foundation of fairly good land in the west, his role became that of gentleman farmer and experimenter in root and cereal crops, aided by his stepson (for he called him that), Tim Hartigan. But after Ned Hoolihan had become an accomplished and scientific seedsman, he found the small farmers and peasants all about him an intractable lot. Instead of sowing “Earthquake Wonder,” a Hoolihan seed-potato of infinite sophistication and vigour, made available to them for almost nothing, they persisted in putting down bastardised poor-cropping strains which were chronically subject to scab, late blight, fusoria, and dread rhizoctania canker (or black scurf). The mild, intellectual agronomist almost lost his temper with them outright. But after some years of tuberose planting and preaching to little effect, his patience finally did give out at their rejectio
n of his miraculously healthy and bounteous seed-wheat, “Faddiman’s Fancy,” for which he had received a citation and praemium from the United States Government. The peasants simply preferred seed of their own domestic procurement, regarding outbreaks of black stem rust, bunt (or stinking smut) as the quaint decisions of Almighty God.

  Ned Hoolihan put his affairs in businesslike train, appointed Tim Hartigan his steward at a decent salary, and emigrated to Texas. There he bought 7,000 acres of middling land, ploughed and fertilised most of it, and put in under Faddiman’s Fancy. The rumour was (though never confirmed to Tim in a letter) that he had married about that time. When the young crop was coming up nicely, several dirty black eruptions disfigured the farmlands. Vile as this discolouration looked, it was found on closer inspection to be oil. And Farmer Hoolihan had become unbelievably wealthy.

  And now Tim Hartigan was scanning the letter. If it was curt, it was the curtness of affection.

  Dear Tim—By the time you get this you will probably have a visitor, Crawford MacPherson, a dear friend of mine. Take away all the dust-sheets, protective stoves, and rat poisons from my own quarters and make my place available and comfortable for Crawford. If you receive orders, obey them as coming from me.

  The Lord be praised, these oil-wells of mine are making so much money that I’ve lost count. There are 315 derricks standing just now, and I have formed the Hoolihan Petroleum Corporation (“H.P.”). Naturally the politicians are moving in but I think I have their measure. Give my regards to Sarsfield Slattery, to the doctor and other neighbours. I enclose extra money.

  —Ned Hoolihan

  Well, well. Tim sat back and thoughtfully filled his pipe. Would this damn Scotchman wear kilts, maybe play the bagpipes and demand his own sort of whisky? But that was bogus, music-hall stuff, like Americans calling an Irishman a boiled dinner and having him wear his pipe in the ribbon of his hat. Very likely this Scot was just another globe-trotter, very well off, in search of snipe or grouse or some other stuff . . . salmon, perhaps. And Sarsfield Slattery? Tim would have to show that letter to Sarsfield, a friend who occupied a position strangely very similar to his own at neighbouring Sarawad Castle where the wealthy owner, Doctor the Hon. Eustace Baggeley, was in permanent residence. It would be true to add, though, that the Doctor was often away in the sense that he was in the habit of taking strange drugs prescribed by himself. Morphine, heroin, and mescaline had been mentioned but Sarsfield believed that the injections were a mixture of the three, plus something else. Like Ned Hoolihan, the Doctor was also a pioneer of a kind. And, again like Ned Hoolihan, he had adopted Sarsfield, another orphan and born in Chicago, when he was attending a medical conference in that city on the extraction by cattle of a toxic hypnotic drug from hay imported from Mexico.

  After Tim had cleared away his breakfast things and washed the dishes, he went up the stone stairs, accompanied by Corny, to refurbish the Boss’s quarters, array the great four-poster bed in clean linen, sweep floors, dust the handsome sittingroom, light fires and pull the chain in the lavatory. In the bathroom he thoughtfully laid out some spare shaving gear of Ned’s, and even put a fishing rod and unloaded shotgun leaning in a corner of the sittingroom. Orders were orders, and Crawford MacPherson would not only be welcome but would be made feel he was genuinely welcome. It was time, Tim said to himself, that he did a little real work for a change—for he was a conscientious young man. And taking counsel with Sarsfield would have to wait for a little bit.

  The forenoon passed quickly and it was about two o’clock in the early autumn day when Tim sat down to his heaped dinner of cabbage, bacon, pulverised sausage, and sound boiled potatoes of the breed of Earthquake Wonder—with Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy propped up against the milk jug. Corny dined noisily on a large ham-bone which originally bore rags of meat. Some people, Tim reflected as he finished his food, thought Hardy a rather repressed and dismal writer, more taken with groans than lightness of the heart. Well, he was long-winded all right but the problems he faced were serious, they were human questions, deep and difficult, and the great Wessex novelist had brought to them wisdom, solace, illumination, a reconciliation with God’s great design. And he had re-peopled the English countryside. The volume itself was the property of Mr. Hoolihan.

  A grinding metallic noise came from the courtyard and, looking through the thick distorting glass of the narrow window, Tim saw the leading part of the bonnet of a large motor car. He knew a good deal about cars, and had driven and looked after a Lancia when Ned Hoolihan was in residence.

  “Humph,” he muttered. “A Packard. Ex-inventory for years. Drive a Packard and proclaim yourself an old man.”

  But he sat there, unmoved. Could this be the Scotchman? Or maybe a manure vendor? Corny growled softly. Whoever it was, he could knock, no matter if the door was only the tradesman’s entrance. Even if it was Jude the Obscure he could knock.

  But there was no knock.

  The door was noisily flung inward and framed in the entrance was an elderly woman clad in shapeless, hairy tweeds, small red-rimmed eyes glistening in a brownish lumpy face that looked to Tim like the crust of an apple-pie. The voice that came was harsh, and bedaubed with that rumbling colour which comes from Scotland only.

  “My name is Crawford MacPherson,” she burred rudely, “and am I to understand that you are Tom Hartigan?”

  “Tim.”

  “Tom?”

  “Tim!”

  “Whatever your name is, tell that crossbred whelp to stop showing his teeth at me.”

  “My name is Tim Hartigan, the dog’s is Corny, ma’am, and both of us are harmless.”

  She moved forward a few steps.

  “Don’t you dare to call me ma’am. You may call me MacPherson. Have the manners to offer me a chair. Have you no respect for weemen or are you drunk?”

  As Tim Hartigan rose, Jude the Obscure fell from his fingers to the floor.

  2

  Perhaps it was a result of Tim Hartigan’s alacrity and good humour, but Crawford MacPherson’s mood softened somewhat to one which, though still formidable, was not ferocious. From her big handbag she took a flat silver flask and from it poured yellowish liquid into an empty glass on Tim’s table. Corny affected a watchful sleep and Tim, busy loading his pipe, had taken a seat on a chair near the window. MacPherson was looking round what once upon a time had been a considerable kitchen, and grimacing as she sampled her drink.

  “How are things going on here?” she asked at last.

  “Well, ma’am . . . MacPherson, I mean . . . going on pretty all right. They are nearly ready for harvest, we have three heifers—two of them milkers—ten bullocks, fifty-five sheep, a saddle horse, three tractors, about twenty-five tons of turf and timber, a few good farm workers, and there is a shop about a mile away for groceries, newspapers, fags and that sort of thing. . . . And there’s a telephone here but it’s usually out of order.”

  “I suppose you think that’s very satisfactory?”

  “Well . . . I suppose things could be worse. The owner, Mr. Hoolihan, has made no complaints.”

  “Oh, is that so? Do you tell me that?”

  Here Crawford MacPherson seemed to frown balefully at the floor.

  “I think that’s the truth,” Tim replied rather lamely, “but it’s only rarely that I get a letter from him.”

  MacPherson put her glass down noisily.

  “Let me tell you something about Mr. Edward Hoolihan, Hartigan,” she said sternly. “I’m his wife.”

  “Good Lord!” cried Tim, colouring.

  “Yes,” she continued, “and don’t you dare call me Mrs. Hoolihan. I am not compelled by civil or Presbyterian canon law to make a laughing-stock of myself with a title the like of that.”

  Tim shifted uneasily in his chair, his mind in disarray.

  “Aw, well . . . I know,” he began.

  “I’m over here to put into effect a scheme of my own which, however, has my husband’s full approval. There is, of course, no limit
to the amount of money I can spend. Mr. Hoolihan thinks that nothing can be done about the peasants of this confounded country. Well, about that, we shall see. We shall see!”

  Tim Hartigan could suspect storm clouds in his future; some thunder. Even lightning, perhaps.

  “Mr. Hoolihan,” he said gently, “had some trouble with them himself some years ago. He found them too conservative. He offered them good advice and material help in agriculture but, bedamn it, they wouldn’t take it. You see, they’re stick-in-the-muds, MacPherson.”

  “Ah,” she said, taking another sup from her glass, “stick-in-the-muds? Yes, they had no time for Earthquake Wonder, I’m told. I’ll tell you this much. Stick-in-the-muds they may be, but my business here is to make sure that it is in their own mud they will stick. Understand me? In their own mud!”

  “Yes. They’re unlikely to want to do anything else.”

  Crawford MacPherson rose, strode to the range where a fire glowed, and turned her back to it, standing menacingly in her brown brogues.

  “What they want or don’t want is not the important thing, Hartigan. It wasn’t, in the past, when a terrible potato famine swept through the country like the judgment of God, about 1846.”

  “Ah well,” Tim ventured, “that was in the dim dark days in the long ago, before we had the good fortune to have Earthquake Wonder in the world.”

  MacPherson shook her forefinger in anger.

  “The people of this country,” she thundered, “live on potatoes, which are 80 per cent water and 20 per cent starch. The potato is the lazybones’ crop and when it fails, people die by the million. They are starving . . . and they try to eat nettles . . . and straw . . . and bits of stick, and they still die. But a more terrible thing than that happened last century. . . .”