The Third Policeman
Page 21
14 February, 1940.
B. O’N.
Elsewhere, the author wrote:
‘Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.’
About the Author
FLANN O’BRIEN was one of the many pseudonyms of Brian O’Nolan, born in Strabane, County Tyrone in 1911, the fifth of twelve children. He attended University College, Dublin, where he soon established himself as a brilliantly funny speaker at student debates. In 1935, he joined the Irish Civil Service and until his retirement in 1953 was Private Secretary to successive Ministers for Local Government.
His first novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds, was published in 1939. The book had been recommended by Graham Greene, then a reader at Longman Publishers. On publication it was praised highly by many, including Samuel Beckett and the near-blind James Joyce, who read the novel with the aid of a magnifying glass. O’Brien’s second novel, The Third Policeman, was, however, turned down. Disappointed, O’Brien told everyone that he had lost the manuscript. He was not to write another novel in English for almost twenty years. His third novel, The Poor Mouth, was published in 1941 in Gaelic as An Beal Bocht. The Third Policeman was published posthumously in 1967.
In 1940, under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen (civil servants were not permitted to publish under their real names), O’Brien began his celebrated satirical column in the Irish Times. Unfailingly witty, feared, respected and loved throughout Ireland, ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ (meaning ‘Little Brimming Jug’) appeared almost daily for nearly thirty years. O’Brien’s journalism is published in several collections, including The Best of Myles and The Hair of the Dogma.
In the 1960s, O’Brien began writing novels again – The Hard Life appeared in 1962, The Dalkey Archive in 1964. By now he had retired from the Civil Service and was in poor health. He died, not inappropriately, on April Fools’ Day, 1966.
By the same author
At-Swim-Two-Birds
The Poor Mouth
The Hard Life
The Dalkey Archive
Stories and Plays
The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman & The Brother
The Hair of the Dogma
The Best of Myles
Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn
Myles Away from Dublin
Myles Before Myles
Copyright
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This Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2007
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Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1960s Series in 2001
Previously published in paperback as a Flamingo Modern Classic in 1993
Previously published in paperback by Paladin in 1988
First published in Great Britain by MacGibbon & Kee Ltd 1967
Copyright © Evelyn O’Nolan 1967
PS Section copyright © Richard Shephard 2007
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1Golden Hours, ii, 261.
2Country Album, p. 1,034.
3Le Fournier, the reliable French commentator (in De Selby – l’Énigme de l’Occident) has put forward a curious theory regarding these ‘habitats’. He suggests that de Selby, when writing the Album, paused to consider some point of difficulty and in the meantime engaged in the absent-minded practice known generally as ‘doodling’, then putting his manuscript away. The next time he took it up he was confronted with a mass of diagrams and drawings which he took to be the plans of a type of dwelling he always had in mind and immediately wrote many pages explaining the sketches. ‘In no other way,’ adds the severe Le Fournier, ‘can one explain so regrettable a lapse.’
4It is not clear whether de Selby had heard of this but he suggests (Garcia, p. 12) that night, far from being caused by the commonly accepted theory of planetary movements, was due to accumulations of ‘black air’ produced by certain volcanic activities of which he does not treat in detail. See also p. 79 and 945, Country Album. Le Fournier’s comment (in Homme ou Dieu) is interesting. ‘On ne saura jamais jusqu’à quel point de Selby fut cause de la Grande Guerre, mais, sans aucun doute, ses théories excentriques – spécialement celle que nuit n’est pas un phénomène de nature, mais dans l’atmosphère un état malsain amené par un industrialisme cupide et sans pitié – auraient l’effet de produire un trouble profond dans les masses.’
1Golden Hours, vi. 156.
2A Memoir of Garcia, p. 27.
3De Selby (Golden Hours, p. 93, et seq.) has put forward an interesting theory on names. Going back to primitive times, he regards the earliest names as crude onomatopaeic associations with the appearance of the person or object named – thus harsh or rough manifestations being represented by far from pleasant gutturalities and vice versa. This idea he pursued to rather fanciful lengths, drawing up elaborate paradigms of vowels and consonants purporting to correspond to certain indices of human race, colour and temperament and claiming ultimately to be in a position to state the physiological ‘group’ of any person merely from a brief study of the letters of his name after the word had been ‘rationalised’ to allow for variations of language. Certain ‘groups’ he showed to be universally ‘repugnant’ to other ‘groups’. An unhappy commentary on the theory was furnished by the activities of his own nephew, whether through ignorance or contempt for the humanistic researches of his uncle. The nephew set about a Swedish servant, from whom he was completely excluded by the paradigms, in the pantry of a Portsmouth hotel to such purpose that de Selby had to open his purse to the tune of five or six hundred pounds to avert an unsavoury law case.
1Page 822.
2These are evidently the same films which he mentions in Golden Hours (p. 155) as having ‘a strong repetitive element’ and as being ‘tedious’. Apparently he had examined them patiently picture by picture and imagined that they would be screened in the same way, failing at that time to grasp the
principle of the cinematograph.
3See Hatchjaw’s De Selby’s Life and Times.
4Bassett: Lux Mundi: A Memoir of de Selby.
1Hatch jaw remarks (unconfirmed, however, by Bassett) that throughout the whole ten years that went to the writing of The Country Album de Selby was obsessed with mirrors and had recourse to them so frequently that he claimed to have two left hands and to be living in a world arbitrarily bounded by a wooden frame. As time went on he refused to countenance a direct view of anything and had a small mirror permanently at a certain angle in front of his eyes by a wired mechanism of his own manufacture. After he had resorted to this fantastic arrangement, he interviewed visitors with his back to them and with his head inclined towards the ceiling; he was even credited with long walks backwards in crowded thoroughfares. Hatchjaw claims that his statement is supported by the MS. of some three hundred pages of the Album, written backwards, ‘a circumstance that made necessary the extension of the mirror principle to the bench of the wretched printer.’ (De Selby’s Life and Times, p. 221.) This manuscript cannot now be found.
1‘Le Suprème charme qu’on trouve à lire une page de de Selby est qu’elle vous conduit inexorablement a l’heureuse certitude que des sots vous n’êtes pas le plus grand.’
2In Lux Mundi.
3Now very rare and a collector’s piece. The sardonic du Garbandier makes great play of the fact that the man who first printed the Atlas (Watkins) was struck by lightning on the day he completed the task. It is interesting to note that the otherwise reliable Hatchjaw has put forward the suggestion that the entire Atlas is spurious and the work of ‘another hand’, raising issues of no less piquancy that those of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy. He has many ingenious if not quite convincing arguments, not the least of them being that de Selby was known to have received considerable royalties from this book which he did not write, ‘a procedure that would be of a piece with the master’s ethics.’ The theory is, however, not one which will commend itself to the serious student.
4Du Garbandier has inquired with his customary sarcasm why a malignant condition of the gall-bladder, a disease which frequently reduced de Selby to a cripple, was omitted from the list of ‘unnecessaries’.
5Possibly the one weak spot in the argument.
6See Hatchjaw: The de Selby Water-Boxes Day by Day. The calculations are given in full and the daily variations are expressed in admirably clear graphs.
7From a chance and momentary perusual of the Policeman’s notebook it is possible for me to give here the relative figures for a week’s readings. For obvious reasons the figures themselves are fictitious:
1Not excepting even the credulous Kraus (see his De Selby’s Leben), all the commentators have treated de Selby’s disquisitions on night and sleep with considerable reserve. This is hardly to be wondered at since he held (a) that darkness was simply an accretion of ‘black air’, i.e., a staining of the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen with the naked eye and also to certain ‘regrettable’ industrial activities involving coal-tar by-products and vegetable dyes; and (b) that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a). Hatchjaw brings forward his rather facile and ever-ready theory of forgery, pointing to certain unfamiliar syntactical constructions in the first part of the third so-called ‘prosecanto’ in Golden Hours. He does not, however, suggest that there is anything spurious in de Selby’s equally damaging rhodomontade in the Layman’s Atlas where he inveighs savagely against ‘the insanitary conditions prevailing everywhere after six o’clock’ and makes the famous gaffe that death is merely ‘the collapse of the heart from the strain of a lifetime of fits and fainting’. Bassett (in Lux Mundi) has gone to considerable pains to establish the date of these passages and shows that de Selby was hors de combat from his long-standing gall-bladder disorders at least immediately before the passages were composed. One cannot lightly set aside Bassett’s formidable table of dates and his corroborative extracts from contemporary newspapers which treat of an unnamed ‘elderly man’ being assisted into private houses after having fits in the street. For those who wish to hold the balance for themselves, Henderson’s Hatchjaw and Bassett is not unuseful. Kraus, usually unscientific and unreliable, is worth reading on this point. (Leben, pp. 17-37.)
As in many other of de Selby’s concepts, it is difficult to get to grips with his process of reasoning or to refute his curious conclusions. The ‘volcanic eruptions’, which we may for convenience compare to the infra-visual activity of such substances as radium, take place usually in the ‘evening’ are stimulated by the smoke and industrial combustions of the ‘day’ and are intensified in certain places which may, for the want of a better term, be called ‘dark places’. One difficulty is precisely this question of terms. A ‘dark place’ is dark merely because it is a place where darkness ‘germinates’ and ‘evening’ is a time of twilight merely because the ‘day’ deteriorates owing to the stimulating effect of smuts on the volcanic processes. De Selby makes no attempt to explain why a ‘dark place’ such as a cellar need be dark and does not define the atmospheric, physical or mineral conditions which must prevail uniformly in all such places if the theory is to stand. The ‘only straw offered’, to use Bassett’s wry phrase, is the statement that ‘black air’ is highly combustible, enormous masses of it being instantly consumed by the smallest flame, even an electrical luminance isolated in a vacuum. ‘This,’ Bassett observes, ’seems to be an attempt to protect the theory from the shock it can be dealt by simply striking matches and may be taken as the final proof that the great brain was out of gear.’
A significant feature of the matter is the absence of any authoritative record of those experiments with which de Selby always sought to support his ideas. It is true that Kraus (see below) gives a forty-page account of certain experiments, mostly concerned with attempts to bottle quantities of ‘night’ and endless sessions in locked and shuttered bedrooms from which bursts of loud hammering could be heard. He explains that the bottling operations were carried out with bottles which were, ‘for obvious reasons’, made of black glass. Opaque porcelain jars are also stated to have been used ‘with some success’. To use the frigid words of Bassett, ’such information, it is to be feared, makes little contribution to serious deselbiana (sic).’
Very little is known of Kraus or his life. A brief biographical note appears in the obsolete Bibliographie de de Selby. He is stated to have been born in Ahrensburg, near Hamburg, and to have worked as a young man in the office of his father, who had extensive jam interests in North Germany. He is said to have disappeared completely from human ken after Hatchjaw had been arrested in a Sheephaven hotel following the unmasking of the de Selby letter scandal by The Times, which made scathing references to Kraus’s ‘discreditable’ machinations in Hamburg and clearly suggested his complicity. If it is remembered that these events occurred in the fateful June when the County Album was beginning to appear in fortnightly parts, the significance of the whole affair becomes apparent. The subsequent exoneration of Hatchjaw served only to throw further suspicion on the shadowy Kraus.
Recent research has not thrown much light on Kraus’s identity or his ultimate fate. Bassett’s posthumous Recollections contains the interesting suggestion that Kraus did not exist at all, the name being one of the pseudonyms adopted by the egregious du Garbandier to further his ‘campaign of calumny’. The Leben, however, seems too friendly in tone to encourage such a speculation.
Du Garbandier himself, possibly pretending to confuse the characteristics of the English and French languages, persistently uses ‘black hair’ for ‘black air’, and makes extremely elaborate fun of the raven-headed lady of the skies who deluged the world with her tresses every night when retiring.
The wisest course on this question is probably that taken by the little-known Swiss writer, Le Clerque. ‘This matter,’ he says, ‘is outside the true province of the conscientious commentator inasmuch as being unable to say
aught that is charitable or useful, he must preserve silence.’
1Le Clerque (in his almost forgotten Extensions and Analyses) has drawn attention to the importance of percussion in the de Selby dialectic and shown that most of the physicist’s experiments were extremely noisy. Unfortunately the hammering was always done behind locked doors and no commentator has hazarded even a guess as to what was being hammered and for what purpose. Even when constructing the famous water-box, probably the most delicate and fragile instrument ever made by human hands, de Selby is known to have smashed three heavy coal-hammers and was involved in undignified legal proceedings with his landlord (the notorious Porter) arising from an allegation of strained floor-joists and damage to a ceiling. It is clear that he attached considerable importance to ‘hammerwork’. (v. Golden Hours, p. 48-9). In The Layman’s Atlas he publishes a rather obscure account of his inquiries into the nature of hammering and boldly attributes the sharp sound of percussion to the bursting of ‘atmosphere balls’ evidently envisaging the air as being composed of minute balloons, a view scarcely confirmed by later scientific research. In his disquisitions elsewhere on the nature of night and darkness, he refers in passing to the straining of ‘air-skins’, al. ‘air-balls’ and ‘bladders’. His conclusion was that ‘hammering is anything but what it appears to be’; such a statement, if not open to explicit refutation, seems unnecessary and unenlightening.